


thread our way through a string of stars

by steelthighsvoideyes



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 07:56:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7883014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelthighsvoideyes/pseuds/steelthighsvoideyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lance is a humble astrophysics student trying to conduct research, which turns out to be a bit difficult to do when he finds a strange guy sitting in his customary research spot. A strange guy looking for aliens, no less. </p><p>Lance isn't going to stand for this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thread our way through a string of stars

**Author's Note:**

> I want to thank cai (@intergalactics) for encouraging me to write this fic, cheering me on throughout, and beta-ing it despite how long it is. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own Voltron or the characters. The plot is entirely my own. 
> 
> Disclaimer #2: Lance and Keith are both not-white and neuroatypical. If you have any concerns with the way I've written them, feel free to let me know and I'll go in and edit! 
> 
> Disclaimer #3: I made up like 90% of the science in this, please don't hold me accountable to it.
> 
> Edit: I've changed Lance's last name to Jimenez because I went back to look at common Dominican surnames and felt this worked better. (It was also really lazy of me to just use Sanchez and I apologize for that.)
> 
> Please excuse all spelling and grammar mistakes I may have made. Enjoy!

Lance Jimenez is a dreamer—it’s what everyone he’s ever met in his life has told him at least once. Even that one lady draped in fake Hawaiian leis, probably having collected one in every color offered, told him on the street in New York while his family had been on vacation. Really, all you had to do was wait for the kid to open his mouth and you knew it wasn’t just his head that was in the clouds—he practically lived in a mansion with 300 acres of property up there.

 

Normally, being called a dreamer is a compliment, and Lance had taken the label as such for the first thirteen years of his life. It implied creativity, ingenuity, enthusiasm, and everything modern society claims is needed in today’s young entrepreneurs and visionaries.

 

 _Visionary._ That’s the word of the day, the true catch here. A visionary is someone with goals—someone who can forge a path and lead society down it to a more wondrous and glorious future. A visionary is a trailblazer and has the power to contribute to society more than the average person could ever hope to.

 

As established earlier, Lance is a _dreamer,_ which is apparently not the same thing as a _visionary_ according to, well, everybody. Lance the Dreamer found this out the hard way when he decided to take part in his high school science fair as soon as he had started the ninth grade.

 

_“It’s too improbable, kid.”_

_“You have big dreams, but they just aren’t very attainable.”_

_“Maybe science isn’t your thing. Have you considered visual arts?”_

_“You lack vision, son. Come back to me when you can prove you have one.”_

Okay, but did that last one even _mean_? Of course he had vision! How else had he collected 5 months’ worth of data and managed to run several (albeit, inconclusive) statistical analyses?

 

_“Well, your ideas are kind of out there,” his older brother says._

_“What he means is that you dream a bit big sometimes,” his father interjects._

_“Way too big,” his younger sister mumbles, “I mean, we have a separate room in the house for all of your fail—“_

_“All of your ideas,” his mother corrects. “You’re a dreamer, Lance. It’s what you do.”_

 

The damage had been done, though. If the world didn’t want his dreams, then fine. He could stick to cold, hard science. He could learn mechanically and just focus on getting good grades. He could conduct research and come up only with _miniscule_ breakthroughs. His _dream_ now was just to be the best in all of this.

 

So here Lance is in college, currently studying astrophysics. It’s a field that’s explored through concrete physics and mathematics while also having unlimited research opportunities, unlike biology where _everyone’s_ trying to cure cancer. It’s absolutely perfect for Lance.   

 

Over the course of two years, while Lance has kept his grades in top shape and has made some very good friends, his ability to dream big has been dulled down by routine, stress, society, and the American education system. He’s great at conducting research and absolutely _loves_ fieldwork, but when it comes to topics of research, he’s been falling dangerously flat. This is where our story truly begins.

 

* * *

 

 Lance trudges across the slightly uneven ground, equipment kit in one hand and a thermos full of French vanilla flavored coffee in the other. It’s the middle of October and this trek has become routine for him over the past month. The third year research project proposal he had submitted to Professor Coran at the beginning of the year required that he go out into the field every night to photograph the sky.

 

Normally, Lance is never one to go out and sit by himself for a few hours at a time because the silence and his own thoughts have the power to drive him nuts. However, he’d scouted out this amazing plateau 20 minutes away from campus that overlooked the desolate but eerily beautiful New Mexico landscape and gave anyone access to a vast and unpolluted night sky. It hadn’t taken him long to declare that as his research area and, soon enough, it also had become one of his favorite places to be.

 

Lance smiles to himself, feeling the warm and familiar excitement over his nightly experience bubble up inside of him: pulling his tarp out, setting up his telescope, and enjoying a hot beverage while listening to his favorite Latin music radio station on Spotify.

 

He’s already jamming to a tune in his head, walking with a rhythm and spacing out in a nice bliss when he halts abruptly just as he’s heading onto the plateau. His fantasy of a lovely night is suspended in midair as he squints into the distance suspiciously. It eventually comes crashing down when his suspicions are confirmed. There is something, some _body_ sitting in his research area. _His_ spot.

 

Lance crosses the last few meters to the edge of the plateau in an outright rage march, sand and dust flying in a visual representation of his determination to give this intruder a piece of his mind.

 

“Hey, you!” he calls out, watching the silhouette of the other person startle and turn around. “What do you think you’re doi—“

 

“ _Watch it,_ ” the other person—a guy, Lance thinks—yells as he holds out a hand in a very obvious “stop-walking” gesture.

 

Lance stops, annoyed at this guy’s audacity to interrupt him, when he hears a groan of metal beneath his shoe. Shifting his foot and looking down, Lance sees that he’s stepped on some bulky mini computer of sorts.

 

“Great, you’ve messed it up,” the boy grumbles, getting up from his original spot to come and squat in front of the mini computer. “Now I have to recalibrate it.”

 

Keeping his eyes trained on the boy crouched near his feet, Lance can’t help but scoff. He’d have folded his arms for more of a dramatic flare if they weren’t already occupied.

 

“Maybe I wouldn’t have stepped on it if you weren’t, you know, _in my spot._ ”

 

The boy frowns as he continues to tap on the mini computer’s keyboard for a few more seconds (much to Lance’s chagrin) and then stands up to face him. He’s about two inches shorter than Lance, East Asian with smooth skin, a face that looks comfortable in a frown, and _is that a mullet?_

 

“How is this _your_ spot? It’s public land last I checked.”

 

“Except I already laid claim to it like, a month ago,” Lance retorted, gesturing wildly at the equipment kit in his left hand. “So it’s now private property. Strictly for very important research purposes.”

 

The other guy folds his arms now, raising a very disinterested eyebrow.

 

“Yeah? Well, let’s see your permit. You have one right? Since you’re apparently a private land owner?”

 

Oh, so _that’s_ how it’s gonna be. Lance sets his equipment kit on the ground, silently relieved he doesn’t have to carry it anymore, and mirrors the other guy’s folded arms as best as he can with a thermos in his hand.

 

“Ever heard of ‘first come, first serve?’ Or, ‘finders keepers, losers weepers?’” Lance huffs, taking pleasure in how the other boy scrunches his eyebrows together in frustration and ignoring the feeling that this guy seems vaguely familiar. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You can leave now.”

 

He doesn’t even wait for the other guy to say anything. Instead, he unfolds his arms, picks up his equipment kit, and makes his way to the edge of the plateau, careful not to step on any of the other odd, glowing equipment spread out across the terrain because Lance isn’t a _total_ heathen.

 

The amount of computers, machines, and papers set up along the plateau surprises Lance, though. He doesn’t recognize half of the equipment, but whatever it is, it looks like this guy is doing some serious research. _Weird_ research, but a frightening amount of it.

 

Lance shrugs it off though because _his_ research is much more important, and he sets down his kit once again, putting his thermos of coffee on top of it so that his hands are free to push some of this guy’s clutter away and make space for his tarp and telescope.

 

Behind him, he hears, “What are you, a child? Hey! Stop touching my stuff! Are you even listening?”

 

Lance can hear the sound of footsteps shuffling towards him as well as the growing indignation in the other boy’s voice, but he doesn’t stop what he’s doing until a gloved hand smacks his wrist while he’s trying to move what looks like a mini satellite.

 

“Stop touching my stuff,” the boy says, scowling.

 

“Stop sitting in my spot,” Lance replies, opening his kit and retrieving his standard blue tarp. He’d love to have the whole plateau, but his rational side reminds him that he _really_ needs to start photographing or else his data may be skewed with further delay. He’s cleared enough space just for his tarp, telescope, and laptop so it’ll have to do for now.

 

“This isn’t _your_ spot, and you can’t just take over my set up here!” The boy crouches and starts to reassemble all the equipment Lance has pushed over, grumbling as Lance smooths out the corners of his tarp to perfection.

 

While reaching back into his kit to grab the parts to his telescope, Lance tosses a glance at the other over his shoulder, making sure the boy catches the smuggest smirk Lance can possibly muster.

 

“It’s public land, sweetheart.”

 

The other guy rolls his eyes so hard, Lance thinks it’s enough force to toss his whole head back.

 

* * *

 

 An hour later and halfway through his vanilla coffee, Lance looks up from the telescope eyehole and glances at the other boy, who’s staring out expectantly at the desert landscape, a stack of papers—photographs?— in his lap, his legs dangling over the edge of the plateau.

 

There’s something incredibly familiar about this guy, and the more Lance thinks about it, the more he’s sure he definitely knows the guy from somewhere. If not the permanent furrow of his brow and tense nature of his jaw, the mullet and the gloves were definitely tickling his memory.

 

“What’re you doing here anyway?”

 

“Hmm?” the boy muses without looking back at Lance. “Looking for something.”

 

Lance takes a sip of his coffee and raises an eyebrow. “For what?”

 

This time, the boy tears his gaze away from the stillness in front of them and holds Lance’s gaze, looking him straight in the eye.

 

“Aliens.”

 

Lance lets out a raspberry that quickly transitions into a laugh. He definitely wasn’t expecting a guy with the broody face to crack a joke at this time of night.

 

“Good one,” he says, still snorting. The guy says nothing though, and continues to stare back at him, shoulders stiff and brow furrowed further. It takes a few seconds before Lance takes in the boy’s body language and realizes _he isn’t kidding._

 

 _“Oh my god,”_ Lance thinks and awkwardly scoots in the direction away the alien guy.

 

* * *

 

Considering the amount of sleep he gets a night now with this whole research project looming over his head, Lance barely commits the occurrences of the night to memory. He’s way too busy trying to bribe his body to function with caffeine and absorbing the theory behind vector calculus in his Methods of Theoretical Physics class to dwell on the weird guy who stole his spot to search for aliens.

 

So when he makes the trek back to his research area that night, equipment kit and vanilla latte in hand, he does a double take when he spots the mysterious guy planted in his spot. _Again._

 

This time, he gives the boy no warning. He simply stomps his way up to the edge of the plateau and starts moving equipment around like he owns the place (which he does in his mind.)

 

The other guy starts, clearly not expecting company again (and that makes two of them), and then protests,

 

“ _You_ again?”

 

“Not sure what you expected,” Lance retorts as he rummages through his kit to pull out his tarp. “I did tell you this was my spot.”

 

The other guy scoots his equipment over before Lance can manage to accidentally kick it and begins fiddling with one of his weird devices.

 

“It’s not _your_ spot.”

 

“Mmmmmmmhm, okay.”

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a particularly cloudy night so Lance isn’t getting the kind of data he’s hoping for. This frustrates the young astrophysics student, but it’s also an opportunity for him to go to bed early and actually manage eight hours of sleep.

 

Remember how we established earlier that Lance is a dreamer? Well, it’s also worth pointing out here that Lance Jimenez is also a hard head. He’d probably win a stubbornness contest with an ox if it came down to it. This trait, combined with his dream to be the best in everything, is exactly what makes him refuse the opportunity to sleep. In fact, he decides that his damn ass isn’t going to be the one that gets up from this spot first. That’s practically like forfeiting rights to the plateau! Plus, he’s still got 2/3 full thermos of nice vanilla coffee. He can manage to stay here for while.

 

So he simply lounges there, laptop put away but telescope out so he can still look semi-professional. He’s on his back, one arm resting underneath his head while the other cradles the thermos. His phone is on his left next to his head, allowing a steady stream of calming Spanish lyrics waft into his ear as he stares at the star littered sky. The sight is just as poetic as the music.

 

A rustling sound next to Lance stirs him from the calmness of it all. Turning his head, he sees the other guy setting down his 8x10 photographs and clearing some space behind him as he too lays down with an arm behind his head. There’s a rough sigh that sounds somewhere between frustration and exhaustion. Lance wonders just how long it’ll be before this guy gives up and heads home.

 

Now that he thinks about it, the guy looks to be in his early twenties, so probably around Lance’s age. Is he a college student? Lance doesn’t think he’s seen the boy around campus recently though. But the closest thing to this plateau that resembles civilization is the tiny college town. He’d have to be from around there, right? Then there was that nagging sensation that Lance definitely knows him from somewhere.

 

Lance rakes his eyes over the mystery that is this Asian guy lying next to him. Mullet aside, he’s actually pretty good looking—the kind of guy who’d get a lot of attention even though he doesn’t speak much and probably hits the gym at least four days a week. Looking at him, you’d never guess he was actually a weirdo hunting for aliens at night.

 

“What’re you looking at?” the other guy asks defensively, and Lance only just realizes that the mullet boy is staring back at him.

 

He doesn’t really have much of an answer, so Lance just shrugs and says,

 

“You know you’re not gonna find any aliens, right?”

 

The other guy scrunches his forehead together.

 

“You don’t know that.”

 

“Uh, yeah I do,” Lance fires back, hoisting himself on his right elbow to gain a height advantage. “I’m an astrophysics student. I know a thing or two about space stuff.”

 

“Whatever,” the other guy huffs and goes back to staring up at the sky.

 

Lance does the same, rolling his eyes while he’s at it. He thinks he’s imagining it when, a few seconds later, he swear he hears a _“they’re there”_ whispered into the still night. Hey may have imagined it, though.

  

* * *

 

 

In the end, Lance is the first one to get up and leave since the other boy actually _falls asleep_ right there on the plateau. The brunette feels a bit bad about leaving him there though. Because annoying as the other guy may be, New Mexico is largely a desert and nights in the desert can be particularly chilly. He doesn’t know anything about the guy though, let alone where he lives or anyone Lance could call to come get him. He could wake him up, but the guy seems to be so deep in slumber, it would be a crime to disturb him.

 

 _He must be incredibly exhausted,_ Lance thinks, frowning.

 

Eventually, he digs through the clutter surrounding the mystery guy and finds a duffle bag with a red pleather jacket inside. It’s really not much, but it’s all the guy’s giving Lance to work with. He spreads the jacket open and lays it across the guy’s upper body, trying to cover as much as he can. That’s when he notices the gloves the guy is wearing are _fingerless._ Lance rolls his eyes so hard he’s surprised they even go back that far. Who even wears fingerless gloves anymore?

 

They’re not fashionable and they definitely were not going to help with the chill. So Lance gingerly lifts each of the guy’s arms and tucks them across the guy’s chest under the jacket. There.

 

His good deed of the day finished, Lance picks up his equipment and empty thermos, shivers into his parka, and sets out for the 20-minute walk back to campus.

 

* * *

 

“I’m telling you Hunk, there’s something up with that guy.”

 

Hunk lifts both of his plates of food in the air and attempts the battle the dining hall traffic in order to reach their customary table. Lance mirrors him with his one plate and Hunk finally answers when they and their food are all at the safety of an empty table.

 

“Just because he took your spot?” Hunk asks, picking up three fries and dipping them into his wax paper ketchup cup.

 

Lance unconsciously reaches over and plucks a fry off of Hunk’s plate, an action Hunk has long since given up protesting against.

 

“Yeah! And because he’s obsessed with aliens,” Lance replies, tossing the fry into his mouth and picking up his fork to dig into his pasta. “Also, where’s Pidge?”

 

“I think they’re running late from lab. It’s on the other side of campus and their short legs can only carry them so quickly,” Hunk says, his mouth semi full. “And being obsessed with aliens doesn’t mean something’s up, you know. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism or something. I mean, if he passed out on the ground in the middle of nowhere, he’s probably tired and stressed out. You sure he doesn’t go here?”

 

Lance attempts to reply with a very full mouth, but stops himself from doing so until he can swallow. Not because he’s in danger of spewing marinara pasta over the table but because he’ll choke if he continues his formulating rant without a free mouth. See, the beauty of Lance and Hunk’s relationship is that they’d both abandoned table manners the first day they’d had a meal together. If anything, this had taught Lance to swallow before speaking because he’s quite known for his mealtime speeches and he’s choked on his food enough times to make him consider swallowing before speaking.

 

“I dunno Hunk, have _you_ seen a good looking Asian dude with a mullet who happens to own a tacky red pleather jacket and _fingerless_ gloves? Double emphasis on the fingerless part by the way because how self-obsessed do you have to be--?” Lance pauses here in order to take another mouthful of pasta, gulping it down as quickly as he can and then choking when he’s swallowed too much at once.

 

(Sometimes the way Lance abuses his esophagus gives Hunk high blood pressure.)

 

“The point is,” Lance continues once he’s successfully soothed his throat with a glass of water and has stopped coughing, “a guy like that is bound to catch attention, _especially_ in a college town like this. And I definitely haven’t seen him around lately.”

 

Hunk raises an eyebrow as he reaches for another handful of fries.

 

“So you think he’s good looking?”

 

Hunk gets a dramatic scoff and a roll of eyes in response.

 

 “Of course that’s the one thing you’d pick up on out of everything I just told you. What I think he is, for your information, is _weird,_ ” Lance replies, reaching over for another one of Hunk’s fries.

 

Hunk immediately swats his wrist and shoots him a glare. It’s the last French fry on the plate and, as generous as Hunk is, there’s no way Lance is having it.

 

Lance merely huffs and tucks the hand under his cheek, leaning his weight against it and furrowing his brow slightly.

“He does look familiar, though. Like _really_ familiar. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I’ve definitely seen the guy’s face—“

 

Suddenly, Lance springs up in his seat, incredibly alert. It causes Hunk to drop the last fry from his fingers and groan in disappointment.

 

“Hunk, what if he’s a spy.”

 

“Who’s a spy?”

 

Pidge sets their backpack down in the seat next to Hunk’s with a very loud _thunk_ , which prompts Lance and Hunk to both raise their eyebrows in questioning. The two have long since abandoned asking what Pidge could possibly carrying around in that massive backpack of theirs. It usually ends either in Pidge explaining a science that is _way_ above the other boys’ heads, or Pidge being very cryptic about it all. Computer engineers these days.

 

“The guy—the _good-looking_ guy, very important detail to note, Pidge—that stole Lance’s research area is apparently,” Hunk answers, trying not to giggle at Lance’s annoyed face.

 

Pidge looks thoroughly unimpressed, as if hearing accusations like these during their lunch break is completely ordinary. Then again, when you’ve got a group of friends like Lance, Hunk, and Pidge, anything becomes ordinary.

 

Lance doesn’t give up the conspiratorial look that he’s now got in his eyes.

 

“Way to tell the whole story, Hunk. But listen, Pidge, it totally makes sense! The guy suddenly shows up with all of this really out-there equipment that definitely isn’t university property because, trust me, I’d know if it were. And he just sets up all his stuff one night and keeps staring at the desert like he’s _waiting_ for something. _And then_ he claims that he’s looking for _aliens_! I’d bet you anything that the reason he’s so familiar is because we’ve seen him around town but like, really discreetly. Like how in _Inception_ , Leonardo diCaprio says that our sub conscience can only fill our dreams with people we’ve seen, even if we don’t know we’ve seen them! _Oh my god,_ what if he’s spying on the school? _My research?_ Who is he spying _for—“_

 

 “Lance,” Pidge interrupts, folding their arms. “You realize that you sound like just as much of a conspiracy theorist as this mystery guy does?”

 

Hunk nods in agreement and adds, “Plus, no good spy would use aliens as a cover.”

 

Lance crosses his arms in indignation (especially annoyed with the conspiracy theorist comment) and leans back in his chair as Pidge reaches for his unfinished bowl of pasta.

“Okay, but it’s the only thing that makes _sense._ More sense than aliens, anyway.”

 

“Lance, you haven’t even asked this guy for his name. You don’t know anything about him! It’s a bit farfetched to start making wild accusations about someone you don’t know, even for you,” Pidge answers wisely, poking the pasta with the fork and scrunching their nose in slight disgust.

 

 Lance sighs heavily. “It’s not totally farfetched if he stole my spot,” he grumbles, though now beginning to deflate a little under his friends’ rational arguments.

 

“I dunno man, if he’s there again tonight, maybe strike up some conversation with him?” Hunk says, and then, before Lance can protest, adds, “Like an _actual_ conversation. Not a fighting one. Maybe he’s actually pretty cool.”

 

Lance mumbles a little more under his breath but eventually straightens again and leans in with his elbows on the table.

 

“Fine, whatever. But if he’s there again and turns out to be a complete wacko, Hunk, I’m enlisting you as my bodyguard. Pidge, you’ll be the stealth backup. You both will have to help me kick him off of my plateau,” the brunette declares with pride and finality.

 

Hunk tosses a questioning glance at Pidge, who just shrugs and braces themselves for another bite of dining hall pasta. Lance takes their silence as a guarantee of services.

 

* * *

 

The other guy’s already there again by the time Lance gets to the plateau with all of his stuff. As Lance tiptoes through the maze of scattered bulky equipment, he sees that there’s already a space cleared out for him next to the guy on the edge of the cliff. Lance blinks back in surprise, cautiously making his way to the spot as he thinks, _did he really do that for me?_

The other guy doesn’t say anything as Lance starts settling his tarp on the ground. He doesn’t even take his eyes off of the desert before them until Lance is completely situated, telescope out and hooked up to his laptop, thermos of vanilla coffee open. Then he looks over and nods.

 

“Hey.”

 

It takes Lance a second to process that this guy is greeting him and then another second to realize that he should probably respond because that’s what adults do. (Of course he was listening when Hunk said to make civilized conversation, he values his friends’ opinions greatly. Most of the time.)

 

“Hey,” he replies. A second passes before Lance senses that the exchange has now left the both of them awkwardly staring at each other, unsure where to proceed from there. So he adds, “Thanks by the way, for uh, you know, clearing this spot for me.”

 

“Don’t mention it,” the other guy says, shrugging. “I figured you were going to show up and kick my stuff around while whining about your spot so, you know, it made sense to just make room.”

 

 _Wow._ Lance is the one trying to have some nice conversation here, but this guy is just flaunting his audacity to be a jerk.

 

Spluttering and trying to find some verbal ground, he finally settles on, “Yeah? Well, I’m taking my thanks back then. You don’t deserve my gratitude, let alone my plateau.”

 

Sticking his nose into the air with purpose and a final _hmph,_ Lance turns away and dramatically slurps his coffee. The other guy just stares at him for a few more seconds, brow scrunching together in silent frustration before also looking away.

 

The two of them sit like that for a good amount of time. No matter how much he adjusts the telescope and how many pictures he takes during that period of quiet, Lance is plagued with just how heavy the silence is (at least for him.) There are a million questions running through his head, and he’s having a hard time convincing himself not to blurt out, “ _Are you a spy?”_ Because he’s pretty sure that’s _not_ how you want to find out if a possible dangerous spy is actually a spy.

 

While Lance is busy biting his tongue so he doesn’t say something ridiculous before he can plan out a smart conversation starter, he almost misses the words,

 

“I was an astrophysics student.”

 

They are spoken softly, almost as if the other guy is saying it to himself and isn’t sure whether he wants Lance to hear them.

 

“Huh?” Lance replies intelligibly, turning his head to face the other guy again.

 

The other guy is still staring out into the distance. “You said yesterday you’re an astrophysics student. I was one too. I dropped out after my first year.”

 

Lance has absolutely no idea why this mystery boy is telling him this, but the drop-out detail is tickling his memory like a feather under his chin.

 

“Why?” he finds himself asking.

 

The other guy shrugs (he seems to do that a lot). “It wasn’t a good fit, I guess. The professors weren’t exactly welcoming towards my research ideas.”

 

 _If your ideas were about aliens, then I can see why,_ Lance thinks, though deep down, there’s a suppressed part of him that sympathizes with that situation.

 

“Especially my Intro to Physics professor,” he continues, scowling a bit now. “All that white hair and no professional wisdom. He shot down my proposal for a research grant before I even submitted it.”

 

The bitterness is palpable in the guy’s tone, yet that’s not what Lance latches onto. Instead, his brain is reeling.

 

“Intro to Physics? A whole bunch of white hair, you mean Professor Alfor?”

 

The other guy looks at him, an eyebrow raised. “Yeah...? Did you—“

 

“Were you in my Intro to Physics class?” Lance asks, his mind grasping at the puzzle pieces of details he’s collected over these three nights. Drop out astrophysics student. Mullet. Red pleather jacket. Silent and broody. Alfor’s class. “ _Holy shit,_ Keith?”

 

The other guy—Keith—stiffens, squinting at Lance cautiously.

“Who are you?”

 

“I’m Lance!” Lance exclaims, though his excitement quickly morphs into annoyance at the aspect that he remembers Keith, but Keith apparently doesn’t remember him. “You know, highest participation grade in the class, second best exam scores—“

 

Keith’s eyes widen and he jabs a finger in Lance’s direction.

 

“You! You’re the guy who constantly interrupted me every time I answered a question. I kept missing the participation bench line because of you!”

 

Lance is the one who shrugs now, his arms out to his sides as if to say “no big deal.”

“Well, I mean, it’s not my fault you kept giving the wrong answers.”

 

“They weren’t wrong! Just because I did the math differently than the way it was taught—“

 

“Hey, methodology is always important! Science would be nowhere without it.”

 

Keith opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again before he simply huffs in frustration and returns to staring out at the desert. Lance turns back to his telescope in silent glee, awarding himself for winning that round.

 

 The two of them settle into another silence, though this time it’s full of a lot more familiarity.

 

It’s Lance who breaks it about fifteen minutes later.

 

“So...did you really drop out to look for _aliens_?”

 

Keith groans.

 

* * *

 

Somehow, without Lance truly realizing it, this goes from annoyance to routine pretty quickly over the next few weeks. He’s not surprised anymore when he sees Keith at the plateau, again before him. The dance he does past all of Keith’s scattered equipment to get to the spot Keith always has cleared out for him is now muscle memory. And every time he starts to set up, he makes sure to show off his irritation at Keith’s presence, which the other similarly reciprocates like the whole thing is a mutually agreed upon ritual.

 

It becomes pretty clear, however, that despite the bickering, the scowls, and the annoyed huffs, the New Mexico desert is much livelier when the two of them are together. Sometimes they’re in the middle of a debate over something like pineapples on pizza, and Lance, sensing Keith isn’t going to let go of his anti-pineapple stance, will turn up his music so loud the exuberant pop beat drowns out Keith’s voice.

 The frustrated noises and shove that Lance receives in return are totally worth it.

 

Sometimes they offer little tidbits about themselves to the other. It’s usually in a pocket of quiet and stillness, the only sounds being a slurp of coffee, a constant beeping of one of Keith’s radars, and an occasional rustling of fabric as the two men attempt to burrow themselves in their respective jackets as protection from the nighttime desert climate.

 

Neither of them knows what prompts them to break the spell and speak. It’s almost like a compulsion, as if the whistling breeze reaches into their core and squeezes it out of them until it turns into this elongated game of 20 questions where no one is asking but the answers just keep coming.

 

_“I hate the desert,” Keith says. “It was okay at first, but it’s just empty. Sad.”_

_“The beach is my favorite place to be,” Lance answers._

_“I’ve never been to the beach,” Keith replies softly._

_“What! Seriously?” Lance exclaims, eyes wide._

_Keith is then treated to a ten minute vibrant description of a beach in the Dominican Republic not far from where Lance’s grandparents live. Lance saturates his monologue with so many verbal similes, hyperboles, and onomatopoeia, but at the end of it all, Keith is left with such a clear image that he feels like he’s just visited a beach._

_There’s another pocket of stillness before Lance contributes his little tidbit._

 

_“The desert isn’t so bad,” he says. “I think it’s actually a pretty happy place.”_

_“How so?” Keith asks, eyebrow raised._

_“Think about it,” Lance says, wistfully looking up at the sky. “How can a place that is looked down on by almost every star visible from Earth be anything but happy?”_

_A pause. “That was really cheesy,” Keith replies._

_Lance snorts. “Shut up, it’s just something my mom used to say. And dude, ‘cheesy’ is so 2000s.”_

_“It’s a_ word, _not a fashion statement.”_

_“Speaking of fashion, those gloves...”_

_It’s a bit longer before they achieve any type of silence again._

 

And sometimes, the two of them allow the emptiness of the desert to envelope them as they lay on their backs, ankles dangling from the edge of the plateau. Lance turns Spotify off because it feels too inappropriate to interrupt the wind whistling through the scant grass, the dirt, and their hair. Both of Lance’s arms are cushioning his head, and he’s staring at the clear sky, breath hitching every once in a while as he’s overtaken by the sheer vastness of it all. He doesn’t have to look to know that, beside him, Keith is probably feeling the same.

In these moments, they are simply two boys breathing slowly and deeply under a velvet blanket of stars, content to be there on that speck of the cosmos and never to admit to themselves that they’re glad the other is on that speck with them.

 

Hunk and Pidge have followed up with Lance about The Other Guy a few times. When Lance informs them that The Other Guy is actually Keith, his old rival from his freshman physics class, it takes his friends a second before Hunk starts humming “It’s a Small World After All” while Pidge deflates a little at the anticlimactic nature of it all.

 

Naturally, since it’s Lance we’re talking about here, Keith pops up frequently in the trio’s conversations. This is mostly due to Lance’s disposition to complain about a multitude of things in his life and Keith gives him a plethora of issues to complain about. As soon as he finds out Keith hates pineapples on pizza, Lance spends the entirety of their study break bringing it up every 20 minutes.

 

_“How does a person hate pineapples on pizza so much?” Lance huffs indignantly, dropping his pencil into his textbook._

_"Lance,” Pidge says in a very foreboding tone, not bothering to look up from their coding, “if you bring up your boyfriend’s hatred of pineapple on pizza one more time, I’m going to pulverize you with Hunk’s_ Electric Energy Systems _textbook.”_

_Lance eyes the massive textbook sitting next to Hunk’s thigh warily and then grumbles,_

_“He’s not my boyfriend.”_

_“Then stop talking and do your Planetary Physics reading.”_

Surprisingly, when Pidge and Hunk _do_ want to talk about Keith, Lance isn’t as forthcoming. They’ve asked him plenty of times what Keith’s like, whether Lance still thinks he’s totally out of it, and what the two of them do considering they share the same space every night.

 

First of all, Lance still has _no_ idea about the aliens part. He and Keith never really came back around to that topic, probably because Keith isn’t going to share without a nudge and Lance is too skeptical to push it. However, when it comes to what Keith’s like and what the two of them do, Lance feels strangely reluctant to answer. He says the basics: Keith’s broody and quiet, and is still stuck somewhere between the 80s and the 2000s. They talk sometimes but that’s it.

           

He doesn’t tell Hunk and Pidge about the odd 20 questions thing they’ve got going. Or how pop music annoys Keith and Lance takes advantage of that. Or the thing they do when they’re particularly tired and lay on their backs while Lance points out constellations and Keith tries to guess what they are. Lance doesn’t tell them that Keith sucks at constellation guessing.

 

And honestly? He’s not sure why he holds back. It seems natural to complain about the guy he now spends a few hours of his life with every night, but anything beyond complaining feels like restricted area. Like these few hours are something only Lance and Keith share and unveiling those moments to the world would feel like a kind of betrayal. It’s like collecting marbles: you store them all in a jar so you’ve got a unique mirage of glass and color to look at and cherish. But that’s it. You don’t take out the marbles and share them with other people. You just keep collecting and cherishing.

 

 Of course, Lance doesn’t realize he’s collecting or cherishing his time with Keith at all because all of this is a very deep subconscious process. He just assumes Keith is enough of a pain in his ass to warrant his reluctance to talk about him when asked.

 

* * *

 

 

Lance scrutinizes Keith with great intensity as the other taps his equipment in frustration and then full on bangs on it. Now, to the average human eye, Keith is a composed young man who assesses, processes, and speaks when meaningful and necessary. But Lance knows much better now. Underneath that cool façade is a guy who hears but doesn’t listen, thinks there’s no such thing as a bad idea, and acts on impulse rather than assessment. All of this is demonstrated by the gritting of his teeth and the utter lack of mercy he’s showing to the malfunctioning machine in his hands.

Really, he and Keith are simply two sides of the same coin. Lance wears his emotions on his sleeve, and Keith wears them on his fists, bears them in his teeth.

 

“It’s busted,” Keith growls, tossing the bulky box out of his lap, crossing his arms, and then glaring at it.

 

“Can’t you fix it?” Lance says, eyes darting around to look at all the other seemingly junk materials surrounding Keith.

 

“Nah,” Keith huffs, giving the metal box one more real mean stink eye before flopping onto his back and huffing again. “The tools I need to fix it are all back at my place and going all the way and then coming back would take too much time. I guess I just won’t find anything today.”

 

 _You probably weren’t going to find anything anyway, my dude,_ Lance thinks, but restrains himself from saying it. The guy next to him is spread out on his back like a defeated starfish, and Lance does have a _few_ bedside manners. Besides, something else tugs at his attention.

 

“Speaking of, where do you even live? I haven’t seen you around the campus or town, and the next town must be at least an hour away.”

 

Keith shifts his glance towards Lance, clearly hesitating. This, of course, piques Lance’s interest even more because he’s a naturally curious person (it comes with the whole dreamer thing.)

 

“I, uh,” Keith starts, sitting up on his left elbow and rubbing his head sheepishly with his right hand. “Well, there’s this shack—I mean, house—I found about fifteen minutes from here. It was empty so I moved in about two years ago after I dropped out.”

 

There’s a flicker of embarrassment before his face scrunches up and shifts into something resembling a challenge, as if to say “go on, tell me how ridiculous it is, try me.”  

 

Of course, Lance, being Lance, doesn’t step down from a challenge.

“You live in a shack. In the middle of the desert.”

 

Keith straightens further, not breaking eye contact. “Yes.”

 

“By yourself.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“So I’m supposed to believe that the alien hunting loner with the mullet and fingerless gloves who lives in a sketchy shack in the middle of the desert isn’t gonna smother me in my sleep. I’m sure I can think of a couple of conspiracy theories that are more believable than that.”

 

There’s an unmistakable flash of hurt in Keith’s eyes before Lance delivers his biggest shit-eating grin. Soon enough, Lance is throwing his head back, howling like a hyena while Keith is visibly suppressing the urge to just all out sock him in the teeth. It’s hot in a weird way, Lance thinks fleetingly, the way Keith looks when he’s contemplating on pummeling him, all flexing collarbone, tense jaw, and knife-sharp gaze.

 

Eventually though, as Lance settles down to give his lungs a break, Keith reaches over, tugs him by the front of his jacket, and flicks him on the forehead. The brunette yelps and pulls away quickly, rubbing his forehead aggressively.

 

“That fucking hurt!” he exclaims, looking peeved.

 

“Yeah well, you’re a fucking asshole,” Keith replies. He’s the one grinning now. The word “cute” flies through Lance’s mind, fleetingly, of course. Lance has never seen him grin before.

 

“Better having an asshole around than being alone,” Lance mumbles, dropping his hand into his lap and looking out into the landscape in front of the plateau instead of Keith.

 

“Yeah,” he hears seconds later, murmured into the wind.

 

(Lance definitely does not note that night that Keith’s grins are framed by dimples.)

  

* * *

 

 

Later that night, once Lance is back in his dorm, he finds he has a hard time sleeping. This is an anomaly for him because he’s mastered the art of sleeping at practically any point in time. He’s even known to be magically unbothered by Hunk’s often thunderous snoring. (If anything, Hunk’s snoring is like a calming noise for him.)

 

However, even with Hunk’s constant snores to lull him to sleep at 2:43am, Lance keeps tossing and turning in bed. Finally, he gives up and lays flat on his back, staring up at the bland and frankly irritating popcorn ceiling. It’s just one thing that’s nagging him, and try as he might, he simply can’t let go of it.

 

His mind wanders to when Keith had told him a few nights ago that he hated the desert. That it’s a sad place. And then he pictures Keith looking out a window of a worn down house in the middle of nowhere, eyes wandering over the same layers of sedimentary rock and soil every day for two years, having no one to listen to except himself and the wind.

 

Lance gut aches just thinking about it because God knows he wouldn’t even survive a week like that. He wonders if Keith is just barely surviving.

 

Does he have friends or a family? Enemies? While Lance has blabbered on about the people in his life, Keith has never once mentioned anyone else. Lance doesn’t know if he’s simply imagined it, but sometimes he thinks he sees a glint of wistfulness and yearning in Keith’s eyes whenever he talks about his mother’s tedious chore list or Pidge’s annoying taste in dubstep.

 

But he had to have made that up, right? After all, the other boy exudes his preference for solitude. He’s constantly rolling his eyes at Lance’s jokes and showing his irritation when Spotify is turned up a bit too high.

 _Or maybe it’s not a preference. Maybe, he’s just too used to it,_ Lance thinks.

 

This causes Lance’s gut to clench into an even tighter knot. No wonder Keith thinks the desert is a sad place.

 

Eventually his eyelids flutter shut and his mind slips into a dull bliss. He dreams that he’s happy and standing with a smiling Hunk and a smiling Pidge and his smiling siblings and a smiling Keith, laughing as the moon shines in the glittering sky and the stars twinkle like diamonds around them.

 

* * *

 

 

“Why astrophysics?” Keith asks. He’s fumbling with one of his weird machines, holding it up to his ear as if tuning it to a certain frequency.

 

Lance is busy adjusting the lens of his telescope when Keith asks the question. The sky is full of many small and thin clouds that whisk by pretty quickly, but they’re plentiful enough that they’re a nuisance. He holds up a finger without looking away to signify a “gimme a minute” and finally gets his telescope to focus on a cluster of stars that’s been overshadowed by the annoying clouds every five minutes.

 

“Come again?”

 

“Why did you choose astrophysics?” Keith repeats, still scrunching his nose up while straining to hear the changes in the light buzz emanating from the machine.

 

Lance would have filed away the expression as cute (actually, scratch that, Lance is definitely _not_ filing these things away in his brain, they are _fleeting,_ remember?) if the question didn’t threaten to open a door towards some well suppressed emotions.

 

Of course, he’s got all of his rational reasoning behind the choice—research opportunities, interest in physics, etc.—but it’s hard to pull those up without the dull ache that accompanies them.

 

“Uh, well,” Lance starts, taking a sip of his coffee and then continuing the fidget with the thermos, “I’ve always been interested in science and I was best at physics in school. So, I figured why not?”

 

Keith sets down his instrument and looks at him, gaze sharp.

 

“That’s it?” he asks. There’s no disappointment or judgment in his voice. It’s full of surprise more than anything.

 

Lance shrugs, thumbs tapping the side of his thermos incessantly. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

 

“Well, I dunno,” Keith says, glancing from Lance to the telescope and then back. “You just seem really...out there?”

 

Lance battles every fiber in his being not to flinch at that.

 

Keith seems to pick up on his tenseness, however, and furrows his brow in his concentration, gaze now dropping to the ground. “Not _out there,_ exactly. More like...” He raises his eyes again to Lance’s face, a tinge of frustration mixed into his expression.

“Everything is an extreme with you. You’re always _really_ loud and _really_ cheerful and _really_ dedicated and _really_ annoying. You can barely handle moments of silence, like every second needs to be filled with _something._ You’ve never struck me as a person who likes standing still, so I just figured there was some cosmic reason you chose astrophysics is all.”

 

An odd sort of silence stretches out between the two of them. Keith doesn’t look away and Lance is too busy trying to absorb all of the other boy’s words. His eyes have widened slightly and he can’t decide if he feels like he’s been hit with paintball pellets or he’s belly flopped into the most refreshing pool of water. Either way, Keith’s words bruise him. Not because they’re mean spirited but because Lance has gotten used to being put down for everything the other had just described. The constant criticisms of his character have numbed him, but Keith’s words come at him like a force, jarring his senses awake, and he can’t decide if it’s painful or refreshing.

 

(It doesn’t escape him, however, that Keith has clearly observed him as more than a frequent pain in his ass and, deep down, Lance is incredibly flattered. He reasons with himself that his heart skipped a few beats more because of the existential anxiety that’s followed Keith’s little rant and not so much Keith’s dark eyes intensely gazing into his own.)

 

Keith, reading Lance’s facial expression and his failure to reply as a very negative situation, drops his gaze once more, suddenly becoming very interested in his shoe.

 

“Sorry, just...if that was overstepping anything, let me know.”

 

Lance drinks in the boy in front of him, a warm and foreign fuzzy feeling creeping up his stomach like a mold infestation. It’s odd to see Keith suddenly insecure in his bluntness, a trait he’s rarely ever shied away from. Yet, considering he’s lived alone for two years and hasn’t had many conversations with other people, he’s bound to feel like he’s wading in thigh deep water with two left feet when trying to approach a potentially sensitive subject.  Lance’s anxiety begins to melt away as it’s replaced with a fondness for Keith’s effort to understand Lance a bit more.

 

(Fondness? Pshh, please. It’s more like pity, of course. Yes, that’s exactly it.)

 

Whatever it is, it prompts Lance into sharing.

 

“I mean, I wasn’t lying when I said I was good at physics in school and all that,” he begins and Keith looks up, both eyebrows raised like he can’t believe Lance is indulging him—though he quickly sets his expression back to neutral as Lance continues. “Turned out, as much as I liked science, I was really shit in stuff like chemistry and biology. But physics just made sense, so I figured I was going to do something with it.”

 

 It’s Lance’s turn to let his eyes wander, finding it easier to talk about this when he isn’t making eye contact. His gaze settles on a collection of tiny red rocks and he scoops them up, rolling them between his fingers.

 

“Plus, there was just something about space. My mom and I used to sit on the porch every night and look out at the sky. She’d sit me in her lap and tell me stories about the stars, pointing at a random one and giving it a name and a backstory and everything. Like,” he cranes his neck and points at a relatively larger twinkling sky above them, Keith’s eyes following, “that star there would be Juan Carlos, the artist, who would spend every night painting an animal on his black canvas and that’s why there are three animal constellations around him. It was like the equivalent of a bedtime story for me, and the night sky was like my favorite book.”

 

Lance smiles absently, juggling the rocks in his hand until his palms are coated in red dust.

“Then, when I turned 6, my older brother bought me an amateur telescope for my birthday. Every summer night he’d take me to a huge field about ten minutes from my house and teach me how to search for different planets and constellations. My younger sister and I would go to the library after school and the librarian would find us on the floor with tons of books about the solar system open all around us and we’d be coming up with fun acronyms for all of Jupiter’s moons.”

  

He pauses, well aware that Keith’s body is facing him now, expression attentive like it always seems to be when Lance talks about his family and friends. His dark eyes are glazed in a soft wonder with a hint of fondness and pining. It warms Lance up in ways he can’t comprehend.

 

“Astronomy just became a huge part of my childhood and I suddenly couldn’t imagine not exploring it. Space is just so vast and mysterious that any theory you could come up with about it has the possibility of being true, and I just _had_ find all of those possibilities. I started dreaming about traveling to different planets or building rovers that could go to Pluto and sustain itself there.”

 

A lump starts to form in Lance’s throat as the memories of childhood experiences with astronomy turn from warm and familial to cold and failure ridden. He has to face out towards the landscape in front of the plateau and start tossing the rocks in his hand one by one so he can successfully hide his short gulps for air. Keith doesn’t break the silence or his gaze and Lance has a few moments to himself as he wills himself to calm down.

  

Once all the rocks are gone from his hands, he pats his dust stained hands on his jeans a few times, leaving red handprint shapes all up and down his calves. Keith snorts immediately and reaches over to brush all the dirt off of Lance’s legs like it’s an instinct or something. He quickly realizes what he’s doing, freezes with his fingers still skimming the old denim, and then coughs awkwardly while withdrawing his hand. He looks incredibly tempted to suddenly become interested in his shoelaces, but nods his head in Lance’s direction, urging him to continue instead.

 

Lance swallows. Now he’s got a lump in his throat _and_ an irregular heartbeat. Wonderful.

 

Clearing his throat, he shrugs and continues, lacing his voice with as much casualness and humor as possible,

 

“Eventually I started getting involved in research, entering in the Earth and Space category in science fairs. It didn’t really work out the way I’d hoped. I think I got fourth place like, _once_ and realized my crazy ideas and inventions weren’t gonna get me some fame anytime soon. So I was like, hey, maybe if I study planets in college, maybe I’ll discover one and name it after myself. That’s definitely gonna get my name out there. So yeah, that’s that.”

 

He ends his speech with his biggest and most Lance-like grin to mask the dull ache inside of him. Lance had purposefully rushed that last part and the entire story ends up becoming a half-truth.

 

He doesn’t tell Keith he’d settled for research and astrophysics. He doesn’t mention how much he’d yearned to become an aerospace engineer, how he fantasized about working on the international space station. He doesn’t say how he had dropped all of those plans the summer before he’d started filling out college applications—how he’d ended up only filling out the application for a state university only two hours from his house. And he definitely does not say why.

            Except that’s the exact question that Lance can see is dancing on Keith’s lips. There’s a frustration lining the muscles of his jaw as if he knows _exactly_ what Lance had left out. As if he knew he’d been treated to only a half-truth. Lance panics, desperately hoping Keith doesn’t ask the fateful “ _why?”_ He can’t handle that right now.

 

Just when it seems like Keith’s about to open his mouth, Lance immediately shoots his foot out, poking the other boy’s right shin with his shoe.

 

“What about you? Why astrophysics?”

 

Keith does his trademark eyebrow scrunch and looks ready to protest. In a tactic of last resort, Lance continues to poke Keith with his foot, making it as annoying as he possibly can.

 

“Come on, come on, come on, it’s your turn for show and tell,” Lance says, keeping his voice light and playful.

 

Thank God in heaven and all the stars above, Keith takes the bait.

 

Shooting his right foot out to kick Lance back, Keith pins the sole of his boot to Lance’s shin and keeps it there, a smug look of victory coating his smooth features. He then leans back, stretching his arms out behind him and resting his weight on his hands.

 

 _Oh my god, there is absolutely nothing sensual about this. Yo, lungs, get it together I have to breathe so stop trying to kill me,_ Lance thinks.

 

“I was adopted from South Korea,” Keith begins, eyes fixed on the sky rather than on Lance, which allows him to take a moment and save face. “My foster dad was white but my mom was Korean so I figure that’s why they adopted me. Anyway, they were nice people and I never ever felt that I didn’t belong in their family. _My_ family.”

 

He pauses for a few seconds, squinting up at the darkness, contemplating how to continue. Though, to Lance, it seems as if trying to rearrange his facial muscles to maintain a neutral expression, to control a bombardment of sudden emotions.

 

“When I was seven my parents disa—I lost them,” Keith finally says, voice strained. His fists curl into fists unconsciously until he realizes it a couple of seconds later and takes a deep, albeit shaky breath.

 

“My mom had no living immediate family so my dad’s parents—my adoptive grandparents I guess—took me in. It was hard for me, dealing with the loss and all, and it was hard for them too. They’d just lost their son and now they were stuck with a traumatized kid who also happened to look nothing like them. I started distancing myself from everyone. My grandparents would drop me off at the bus stop for school and I’d run away and hide in the park all day. I never went out to play like other kids. Sometimes, when it was particularly bad, I’d sneak out of the house at night and wander around until somebody on the neighborhood night watch brought me home at 2 o’clock in the morning. I was 7, I was spiraling, and I’m pretty sure my grandparents were regretting having me around.”

 

Here, Keith’s breath hitches as he tries to take another deep breath and this time Lance, without really thinking it through, places a reassuring hand on the other boy’s shoe, the one that’s currently pinned to his leg. It’s a little bit before sirens start going off in his head— _Umm, you’re holding his foot? Buddy, what are you doing? —_ but the gesture seems to alleviate some of the tension coiling in Keith’s shoulders.

 

Keith tilts his head back down, the corner of his mouth quirked up at the most miniscule of angles. But we’ve established that Lance is damn good at physics so he knows his planes and angles and that barely-there hint of a smile certainly does not escape him. (He totally wasn’t looking for it, by the way.) So he doesn’t remove his hand.

 

“I think they finally got tired of it all because one morning, my grandfather plucked me out of bed, put me in the car and just drove. My grandparents live in Northern California, so after driving for about an hour we got to some redwood state park. He still didn’t tell me what we were doing there. Instead, he just handed me a backpack and a map for the hiking trail and said, ‘We’re going to go find what’re you’re looking for, Keith.’”

 

“At the time, I had absolutely no idea what he meant. I thought maybe he knew what had taken my parents and that I’d find them in this forest. God, I was so foolishly hopeful that at some point while we were hiking, my grandfather bent to tie his shoe, and I took off completely off the trail. I wanted to find them. My grandfather was moving too slow. I didn’t want to stick to the trail, it was too boring.”

 

Keith pushes himself off of his hands and leans over now, crouching so that his arms rest on his elbows. Lance doesn’t dare move, very aware that the both of them are now only about two feet apart. Keith doesn’t seem to notice. (Unfortunately.) Instead, he hums pensively, eyes unfocused in a way that indicates he’s too deep into his introspective thoughts to notice his surroundings.

 

“I don’t remember what exactly happened while I was out there. All I know is that my grandfather was extremely worried and had park services look all over for me. Eventually I turned up in the parking lot and when he found me, he said that I had the biggest grin he’d ever seen on my face—that despite how dirty I was, I was glowing. His words, not mine.”

 

Keith’s brow furrows. He’s still not looking at Lance.

 

“It took me a few years to realize that it wasn’t really my parents I was looking for, or for the answers behind their disappearance. Instead, I needed the unknown and the fear that came with it. I craved the adrenaline rush like I was starving and desperately needed a fix fast. I was looking for everything that I didn’t know existed in myself and the world because I _needed_ to know that there was more out there than what I was currently feeling and seeing.”

 

“I started getting my grandfather to take me out more and I hiked through state and eventually national parks all up and down the Pacific Northwest. But it wasn’t enough. I needed _more._ So that’s why I chose space and astrophysics. There’s so much unknown out there, I’ll never run out of it. It’s an endless supply of adventure and adrenaline. So...yeah.”

 

He sounds breathless when he’s done speaking, like he’s on a rush just _thinking_ about it all. It’s probably contagious because Lance is sitting opposite him, breathing through his nose like he’s just run two miles. Or maybe he feels like that because Keith is now staring at him, gaze flickering across his face, looking for something. Looking and looking and looking, does Keith ever _stop_ looking?

 

Lance’s fingers tighten around the foot that seems to be digging into his shin more now. He’s measuring the slope of Keith’s eyelashes in exponential equations because he’s close enough to do so, his stomach is twisting into so many knots it would put sailors to shame, and _Jesus_ it’s nighttime, why is it so _hot?_

 

_Abort. ABORT. A B O R T._

 

Lance practically yanks his hand and body away, leaning back on his elbows so as to get his face as far away from the other as possible. Except now his body is stretched out in front of Keith in a way that still makes him feel awkward and vulnerable. So dispels the entire mood with his brand of jarring humor.

 

“So...did you hunt aliens too? When you were hiking in the national parks?”

 

Keith makes a strangled guttural noise and shoves at Lance’s knees when he says, “Hey, it’s a completely valid question,” while visibly trying to hold back a shit-eating grin.

 

“Maybe,” he mutters through gritted teeth.

 

Lance throws his head back and howls. Keith shoves him even more, fingers lingering on his knees for a bit too long, and despite how much Lance tries to make a show of his laughter, he feels every millisecond of it.

 

Eventually, much to both Lance’s joy and chagrin, the machine Keith had been toying with earlier starts beeping and the other withdraws completely in a flash, practically pouncing on the machine. Lance is left to his own and he figures he should check on his telescope. Those damn clouds are probably in the way again.

 

Shaking his head, he closes one eye and moves to squint into his eyehole. As he does so, however, another ache grips his gut, much like the one he’d experienced on the night he couldn’t sleep. Hearing Keith attend to the machine with a controlled desperation—like he’s trying not to hope but he wants to so badly—Lance is struck by the revelation that Keith, too, had only told him a half truth.

 

Looking for aliens isn’t just some wacky obsession of his. It’s tied to the deep sense of longing he’d described earlier, though Lance, for the life of him, cannot figure out why. The question is now seared onto the tip of his tongue, threatening to burn his mouth if he doesn’t ask _why._

           

Lance bites his tongue and reigns the flaming curiosity in. Keith hadn’t asked, so Lance won’t either. They both have chosen to stew in each other’s half-truths, enduring the ravenous curiosity and the slight hurt at how neither have them have told the other their whole story. They’ve been sitting with each other every night like this for almost two months now. Maybe they both figured they deserved to know more.

 

But, now that Lance thinks about it, this is the most Keith has ever spoken to him at once. He’s a man of few words, preferring to let his actions do the talking. So the fact that he’d taken the time to articulate even that much is enough to bring that fuzzy feeling back into Lance’s belly. He’s suddenly gripped by the notion that Keith deserves to be heard by others. He deserves to be with people. He deserves to have friends he can trust. He deserves to have someone he can turn to when he has nowhere else to go.

 

(Little does Lance know that deep, _deep,_ down, Keith is starting to think that someone is Lance.)

 

A silence takes hold of the plateau and, after a while, it becomes clear that Keith’s radar isn’t showing him anything conclusive. Following Keith’s fifth heavy sigh, Lance breaks the quiet.

 

“Every Friday night around midnight—because that’s when I end up getting back to campus—Pidge, Hunk, and I get together for Trivia Night. It’s usually in our room—Hunk and me—because Pidge lives on a different floor and their roommate likes to have friends over a lot. Anyway, it’s like a tradition for us. We’ve been doing it ever since freshman year when Pidge and Hunk were both taking a gen-ed bio course required for the engineering students and I was helping them study by quizzing them with flashcards. It eventually became a competition between them and I eventually jumped in because I can’t _not_ compete and now we just do it every Friday just to let loose and have fun.”

 

Keith looks over at him, both eyebrows raised, though there’s still a lingering hint of frustration. “Why are you telling me this?”

 

Lance shrugs. “I figure you probably don’t hang out with a lot of people, living in the desert and all. And you probably don’t have too many Friday night plans aside from alien-hunting.”

 

“Are you trying to rub it in or something?” Keith asks, tone laced with defensiveness.

 

Lance whacks the other guy’s arm with the back of his hand, though his voice is surprisingly gentle.

 

“No, you idiot. I’m inviting you to Trivia Night.”

 

 “Oh.”

 

* * *

 

 

On Friday night it takes the two of them a little longer to reach campus than it usually does for Lance. As it turns out, campus is a lot farther away from the plateau than Keith’s desert shack and even his arms can get tired (yeah, Lance has noticed his biceps, so what?) By the time they reach Lance’s dorm and Lance turns the key in the lock, it’s 12:10am.

 

They’re greeted by a very loud, “TEN MINUTES LATE, LANCE. TAKE A SHOT.”

 

Lance groans and plunks his stuff on the bed. The greeting, it turns out, is issued by Pidge, who has a stern and determined expression plastered on their face. They and Hunk are both sitting in the small space on the floor between Hunk’s and Lance’s beds, and in front of them are a number of bottles ranging from coconut rum to good old Smirnoff vodka as well as 4 shot glasses.

 

“Okay, but I was late for a very valid reason,” Lance argues, gesturing with both hands at Keith. “It’s not my fault Keith here can’t carry all of his alien junk. By the way, Keith, you can just put your stuff on my bed, there’s barely any room on the floor.”

 

Keith stands next to him, both eyebrows raised as his eyes flicker from Lance to Pidge and Hunk to the copious amount of alcohol in front of them. It’s very clear that this is definitely not how he imagined Trivia Night would go down. As he starts to relieve his arms of all of his equipment, Lance says,

 

“Also, right, introductions. Keith, these are my two dumbasses, Pidge and Hunk. Pidge, Hunk, this is the asshole, Keith.”

 

Hunk beams and holds out a hand when Keith’s are free, shaking his right hand with a firm and enthusiastic grip.

 

“Nice to finally meet you, Keith,” he says.

 

Keith gives him a small and courteous smile, mumbling a “nice to meet you too” as he takes a seat next to him. Pidge is sitting on the opposite side of Hunk, right across from Keith, and their arm doesn’t extend far enough over the bottles to meet Keith’s, so they simply wave and grin.

 

“Yeah, we’ve heard a lot about you. You’re a common household topic.”

 

“Really?” Keith asks, casting Lance an interested and somewhat mocking glance as he’s taking his place on the floor next to Keith and Pidge.

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Lance replies, rolling his eyes. “I like to complain about how annoying you are.”

 

He playfully delivers punch to Keith’s shoulder, which Keith replies to with a snort and a light smirk. Pidge’s and Hunk’s eyebrows shoot up to their hairline. It’s apparent that they were expecting some sort of elongated banter to ensue but _clearly_ Lance hasn’t let them in on all of the details of his time every night with Keith.

 

Lance doesn’t notice this at all. Instead, he claps his hands together loudly and rubs his palms.

 

“Okay, so! Trivia Night—“

 

“Take a shot first, Lance,” Pidge repeats sternly.

 

Lance whines, hoping his frequently used pout will convince Pidge otherwise.

 

“It’s in the rules, Lance,” Hunk jumps in, shrugging. “If anyone’s late, they have to start with an extra shot. I’m pretty sure you wrote that part.”

 

Lance simply huffs and mutters a faint “traitor” before scouring through the collection of bottles and singles out the tequila. Plucking his shot glass from the floor—the translucent blue one—he fills it to the brim, then tilts his head back and tosses the dark amber liquid down. A familiar burn lines the side of his throat and seeps into his nostrils, and it takes all he has not to cringe. It’s really too bad they don’t have salt and lemon to accompany the tequila, but, considering the pace at which Trivia Night normally goes, things would get too messy if they had any.

 

As he slams the glass back on the floor in front of him, he sees, from the corner of his eye, Keith staring at him. Lance tries his very best to ignore him, crossing his arms and huffing dramatically.

 

“There, happy?”

 

When he quickly checks his peripheral vision again, Keith is no longer looking at him but at Pidge. What he feels definitely is _not_ disappointment.

 

“Aren’t you guys afraid of getting caught?” Keith asks. It’s clear to Lance that the other is still stuck in their freshman view of college occurrences, which isn’t surprising considering he’d dropped out and lived in the desert for two years.

 

Pidge shakes their head.

 

“Nah,” they reply, turning to grab their backpack behind them. “The RA on this floor, Shay, is super nice and chill. She wouldn’t rat us out.”

 

“Besides,” Lance jumps in, “Hunk is dating her, so we’re _definitely_ in the clear.”

 

“Yeah, well,” Hunk mumbles, a shadow of a blush creeping up his dark skin, “she’s still really good at being an RA, so.”

 

“I don’t doubt it, buddy,” Lance says, grinning. “I just love it when my friends date influential people. Like, every since Shiro started dating my Teaching Assistant, Allura, my lab grades definitely started going up by like a point or two.”

 

Keith blinks, body alert. “You know Shiro?”

 

“Uh, yeah, the grad student who works in the astrophysics department?” Lance questions, an eyebrow raised. “He’s a good friend of ours. Why?”

 

“Oh, nothing,” Keith replies, shrugging. “It’s just that he’s the one who snuck me some of the university’s older equipment when I dropped out, that’s all.”

 

He motions to his stuff on Lance’s bed and there’s a trace of warmth in his eyes that for some reason Lance hyper-focuses on.

 

“Oh. That’s cool,” is all he says.

 

“Okay,” Pidge cuts in, having rummaged through their bag and pulled out a tablet. “Time to finally start Trivia Night. Hunk, would you like to do the honors?”

 

Hunk nods and proceeds to place a shot glass in front of himself (the translucent yellow one), Pidge (the green one) and Keith (the red one).

 

“The game’s pretty simple,” he starts. “Basically, we pull up a set of science trivia flashcards ranging from cell biology, anatomy, organic chem, you name it. One person reads the question on the flashcard and the other three have to answer. The first person who answers and gets the answer right wins that round. The other two people have to take a shot.”

 

Hunk pauses and looks at Keith, who nods to indicate that he’s following so far. So Hunk continues,

 

“But, if you answer and get it wrong, _you_ have to take a shot and the other two remaining people have one more chance to get the question right. If nobody can answer the question in ten seconds, everyone except the person asking the question takes as shot. And, of course, if you’re _late_ to trivia, you have to take an extra shot, so you start off with a disadvantage. The person the soberest after twenty questions is the winner. Or however many questions we get through before someone can’t read the trivia cards right. Did that make sense?”

 

Keith nods again, looking determined. “Yeah, 100 per cent,” he says, fingers absently toying with the shot glass in front of him.

 

During this time, Lance starts separating the bottles out in front of them, placing a specific one in front of everyone.

 

“So what’s your poison, Keith?” Hunk asks, gesturing to the agglomeration of alcohol in front of them. “I’m more of a coconut rum person, Lance always goes tequila, and Pidge is a sucker for vodka.”

 

“Ummm,” Keith hums, surveying his options. “You guys got any Jägermeister?”

 

Lance snorts.

 

“Of course you’d drink straight shots of jäger,” he goads at the same time Pidge says, “Yeah I think we’ve got some left over from a while ago.”

 

“It tastes better than tequila of all things,” Keith jabs back as Hunk finds the half-full bottle in question and places it in front of him.

 

Lance gasps, clutching his heart and tossing himself in Pidge’s direction in an act of pure drama.

 

“How dare! I’ll have you know that _tequila_ is an absolute godsend.” He makes sure to flatten his tongue around the word, pronouncing it in his Dominican dialect of Spanish.

 

Pidge just snorts next to him, taps a few times on their tablet, and then looks up.

 

“Alright, time for the first trivia question of the night. Everyone, take your mark!”

 

Lance and Hunk immediately start filling up their shot glasses, followed by Keith who catches on a second later.

 

“ _What,_ ” Pidge starts dramatically, pushing their glasses further up their nose, “is the hardest substance of the human body?”

 

“Tooth enamel!” Hunk blurts out almost immediately, grinning before Pidge even indicates it’s the right answer.

 

“Correct,” Pidge says, handing the tablet clockwise to Hunk. “Gentlemen, take your shots.”

 

Lance mutters something about _totally_ knowing that one before raising his shot glass to his lips, Keith following suit. Lance is aware that he’s built up a solid tolerance for alcohol in the past two or so years with the regularity of Trivia Night and all, but he’s already consumed one shot more than Keith and two more than Hunk and Pidge, so he can’t afford to lose his competitive spirit any time soon.

 

“Okay, Hunk, go go go!” he exclaims filling up his shot glass again with Pidge and Keith mirroring the action on either side of him.

 

Hunk swipes left on the tablet to get to the next flashcard and clears his throat.

 

“Alright, what is the strongest known magnet in the universe?”

 

Hunk barely finishes reading the question before Lance and Keith are both shouting, “Neutron star!”

 

 Then they’re both looking at each other, the same determination reflected on both of their faces and the fierceness practically _radiating_ off of them.

 

“ _I said it first!_ ” they both exclaim in unison, and Hunk just stares at the two of them, thick eyebrows back up into his hairline.

 

“Um, well, I couldn’t tell who was first so...”

 

“Let’s just keep the astronomy questions to a minimum,” Pidge suggests, lifting their shot glass and downing it, scrunching their nose and shaking their head. Considering Pidge’s size, which is a good number of inches shorter than everyone else in the room, Lance always marvels at how they take their shots like an absolute champ.

 

“Yeah, I agree,” Hunk says, passing the tablet to Keith. “Lance, Pidge and I will probably pass out and you and Keith’ll wake up with black eyes or something,” he adds when he notices Lance is about to protest.

 

Lance shuts his mouth and grumbles a bit under his breath before turning his body slightly so that he’s facing Keith, who is _totally_ smirking at him. That asshat.

 

Hell breaks loose between Lance and Pidge when Keith reads his question (what two elements on the periodic table are liquids at room temperature?)

 

“Mercury and Iodine!” Pidge calls out, slamming their hand on the ground.

 

“ _EHHN,_ ” Lance yells, mimicking a loud gameshow buzzer. “Mercury and _Bromine._ ”

 

“How the hell is it Bromine?”

 

“Pidge, Iodine makes no _sense,_ what the fuck?”

 

The two of them continue to squabble as Hunk merely sighs and takes his shot in defeat. Keith merely looks on at the both of them going at it over a simple chemistry question, his eyes glazed over in what seems to be endearment and _both_ corners of his lips curved into the smallest and most innocent of smiles. Lance catches the tail end of Keith’s expression before it morphs back into his normal neutral one, and there are at least three butterflies floating around in his stomach.

 

* * *

 

It’s nearly 2 am by the time they’re finished with the game. Pidge had been the first to drop out of the game after about ten questions. Despite their ability to hold their liquor in like a sailor, they’re still much smaller in body mass and were at a disadvantage the whole time as a computer engineer who kept getting fed chemistry questions. They’re incredibly loud and boisterous when drunk, however, and had continued to serve as a personal cheerleader for whoever was currently winning.

 

Keith forfeits almost immediately after Pidge, which makes sense since his tolerance is probably shit after being painfully sober for two years. He’s a lot more prone to laughing when drunk, Lance notices, and it’s not long before he starts taking advantage of that, cracking every joke his muddled brain can muster. After he realizes what he’s trying to do, he dismisses the rational part of his brain that tries to restrain him. He’s drunk, he can do whatever the hell he wants, and dammit, he wants to make Keith laugh.

 

Then it’s just down to Lance and Hunk passing the tablet back and forth in an intense trivia faceoff. Pidge is cheering for Hunk now, draped all over his large shoulders and Hunk is trying really hard not to wince considerably at the sudden loud voice in his ear. Lance’s senses are swimming in fog now and what he really needs is to pee and then lay down for a good, long while. But he maintains his bravado by straining every single fiber in his being. It also definitely helps that Keith’s arm is now slung over his shoulder, the other boy warm against Lance’s body as he exclaims “ _come on, you’ve got this_ ” to combat Pidge’s vigor.

 

Except Lance totally doesn’t have it. He gets the next question wrong and picks up his shot glass, eyeing it with so much disdain that he feels like he could vaporize the drink into ashes. His stomach churns as he contemplates his beloved tequila. He and Hunk are neck and neck, but Lance knows Hunk can’t hold out much longer either. All he has to do close his eyes and take this one shot and hope Hunk gets the next wrong so he can forfeit first.

 

Keith’s arm is still around him, fingertips digging into his left shoulder and arm leaving a bridge of fire across the back of his neck. Pidge is chanting _“he can’t do it, he can’t do it,_ ” Hunk is squinting at him with desperate scrutiny, and _oh Christ,_ he can’t do this.

 

Lance sets his shot glass down and shakes his head as lightly as he can so as not to dunk himself in a pool of nausea. Across from him, Hunk throws his arms up and whoops in celebration while Pidge is losing their mind, shredding some random paper they’d found on one of the desks in the room and making it rain.

 

Lance can practically _feel_ Keith’s grin next to his ear, that’s how close he is, and considering his current state of sensory overload and the multiplying butterflies in his stomach, he simply cannot have this right now. He wiggles out of Keith’s arm, who’s too busy laughing at the celebrating Pidge and Hunk to notice, and excuses himself so he can run to the bathroom down the hall.

 

When he returns, bladder relieved and head not swimming as much, he finds his three friends lying on their backs, all talking casually. As he steps over Keith’s body to return to his original spot and reclines to lay on his back as well, he tunes in to Pidge talking about their dad and older brother. They’re recounting a story Lance and Hunk are already familiar with and Lance realizes it’s for Keith’s benefit. As the conversation continues, it seems that Keith is the one asking all of the questions, trying to get to know Pidge and Hunk as much as he can. Sometimes Lance turns his head towards him and sees the other’s expression shift with the rises and falls in Hunk’s story about how he’d asked out Shay. Admittedly, he’s never seen Keith let so many emotions show on his face. Yet here he is, listening intently and absorbing all that he can from the people around him with all of his inhibitions that have sprung from solitude lowered.

 

Lance’s heart grows about five sizes in that moment and he _knows_ that bringing Keith here had been the right thing to do.

 

Eventually, Pidge’s voice trails off in the middle of another story and a constant snoring starts to emanate from where Hunk is sprawled out. There’s no other sound in the room except for an occasional wind blowing through the two open windows in the room. It makes Lance restless, especially so in his drunkenness, so he shimmies over in the direction of Keith until their shoulders bump.

 

“ _Keith_ ,” he whispers, nudging the other’s shoulder with his own. He’s fully aware that both of their bodies are now lined up perfectly against the other, and he fights the shiver that threatens to crawl up his spine.

 

“Hmm?” he gets in response, along with a nudge back.

 

“Just checking to see if you’re awake,” Lance says, turning his head to face the other boy.

 

Keith does the same so they’re both looking at each other’s faces now. His tongue darts out to lick his lips, his chest is rising and falling at the slowest of rhythms.

 

“Yeah,” Keith whispers back. “I’m awake.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Neither of them says anything after that, but they don’t look away from the other. Lance lets his eyes trail over all of Keith’s features, drinking in as much as he can because who knows when he’ll be this close to him again. He takes note of the way Keith’s bangs fall messily into his eyes (framed by the slightest hint of crow’s feet), the crooked nature of the bridge of his otherwise perfectly pointed nose (he’ definitely broken it before), and the almost indiscernible mole resting at the bottom of his right jaw (Lance wants to kiss it).

 

Did he just think about kissing Keith’s mole?

 

Before he can panic and whisk himself into a drunk spiral, Keith licks his lips again and speaks,

 

“Thanks. For inviting me tonight. It was fun.”

 

Lance quirks a smile. “Yeah?”

 

Keith nods, a faint smile playing on his lips as well. “Yeah. You have really good friends, Lance. Hunk and Pidge. And Shiro.”

 

Lance isn’t sure why his smile morphs into a frown at Shiro’s name, but he figures it has to do with the familiarity with which Keith says it. Why that’s even bothering him is a completely different matter, but it just _is._

 

“Were you and Shiro good friends?”

 

“Hmm?” Keith hums, his eyes shifting as a look of nostalgia settles on his face. It churns Lance’s stomach like butter, or maybe that’s just the alcohol. “Yeah, we were...close, I guess.”

 

“Oh,” Lance mumbles, unable to think of any other response.

 

Keith doesn’t need one, however. He continues, brow furrowing in concentration like Lance has seen it do so many times before.

 

“He helped me out with a lot of things freshman year.”

 

“He did?” Lance’s mouth tastes like he’s just sucked on cotton, but that also may be because of the alcohol.

 

Keith nods again. “He’s the one who helped me make the decision to drop out.”

 

“Oh,” Lance says again, and pauses. “Does he visit you? In your desert shack?”

 

“Nah,” Keith replies, shaking his head, clearing his face of the nostalgia in the process. “I told him not to. He was busy and I had things to do. You’re...you’re the first person I’ve spoken to in a while.”

 

His voice drops lower as he says that last sentence, as if saying it more to himself than to Lance. Either way, it causes a multitude of things to surge in Lance, from a weird sensation of pride to sadness and sympathy. He lifts his left hand and crosses the small distance between them with it, fingertips ghosting over the other boy’s face from his hairline to his jaw. He hears Keith’s breath hitch as he does so and then drops his hand, draping the arm across his own chest. He thinks maybe it’ll look like a stretch more than anything. They’re both drunk and it’s likely none of this will stick in their minds.

 

Keith’s chest isn’t rising and falling with its original regularity now, though. There’s something erratic in his breathing now and there’s a spark of restlessness flowing through his body. Eventually, he hoists himself up on his left elbow, his body now positioned so that it’s almost hovering over Lance’s and the brunette is looking up at him.

 

Lance doesn’t realize that, until now, he’s been holding in a breath, and when he finally releases it, it’s shaky and unstable. His thoughts are swimming and he can’t get them to focus while he’s staring up at Keith. Thinking and breathing both seem too dangerous and he feels as if even blinking will shove Keith away.

 

It’s now when reality washes over him and Lance realizes that he _wants_ Keith this close to him, and maybe even more so. He can’t bear the thought of separating from him now and it’s probably a good thing that the alcohol has slowed his ability to start panicking when the other boy licks his lips again.

 

 “Thanks,” Keith says, so softly Lance has to strain to hear the word.

 

“You already said that,” Lance replies just as quietly, heartbeat in his mouth.

 

“No,” Keith utters firmly. “Thanks for being there with me. Every night.”

 

Lance snorts, feeling his lips twist into of his customary smirks. “It’s not like I have a choice.”

 

The muscles around Keith’s mouth quiver, like he’s trying his best not to grin. “Yeah, I guess not.”

 

And then he’s kissing him. _Holy shit,_ Keith is kissing him. Lance’s eyes widen as he feels chapped, alcohol stained lips envelope his own in a chaste fashion. His brain is short circuiting but there’s a tug in his gut and a roar in his chest and it hits him like the winds of a hurricane that he wants this, that he’s wanted this for quite some time.

 

Lance lets his eyes flutter close and lifts his left hand to cup Keith’s face instead of skim over it like earlier, thumb brushing across the other’s cheekbone as he begins to return the kiss. It’s bitter and dry because of the alcohol and it’s sloppy and uncoordinated because they’re drunk, but Keith shifts so that his body his directly over Lance’s, his weight on his elbows, which are framing Lance’s head, and Lance decides he doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here.

 

He’s not sure how long it’s been when they finally part, but his fingers have threaded themselves into Keith’s soft, black hair and his right arm is loosely wrapped around Keith’s waist. The other’s hands are similarly carded through Lance’s hair, chest heaving slightly and face flushed a deep pink both from the alcohol and the kiss.

 

They’re still both close enough to where their lips are just barely brushing against each other and Keith’s breath is hot on Lance’s face. Neither of them want to move, but Lance feels as if his nervous system is on fire and drowning at the same time and Keith must be feeling the same way because his biceps are wobbling on either side of Lance.

 

“I’m tired,” Lance says, relishing in the way his lips are still able to skate over Keith’s as he speaks.

 

“Me too,” Keith responds and then relieves the weight off of his elbows and forearms, returning to lying on his back next to Lance. Their shoulders and thighs are still touching though and, at this point, Lance will do anything to keep it that way.

 

“Goodnight Keith,” he says sleepily, darkness already beginning to cloud his vision.

 

“Goodnight Lance.”

 

* * *

 

 

Lance wakes in the morning to the worst case of cottonmouth in the world and a bass pounding in his head. For some reason they’d never turned the lights off in the room at night so the light bulbs and the sunlight are glaring in his face and he shuts his eyes tight like his life depends on it. Shifting in his morning drowsiness, he finds that he’s completely curved around Pidge’s small figure, which is tucked Hunk’s arm.

 

It’s actually incredibly normal for them to wake up like this, probably having huddled together for warmth in their sleep. (Though Lance prefers it when _he’s_ the one sandwiched in the middle, but considering their sizes, it’s a rare occurrence.)

 

What’s not normal is Lance jolting awake and sitting up after remembering what had happened before he fell asleep, heaving with nausea at the sudden movement. Covering his eyes with both palms, he tries to take deep breaths and count in his head until the sensation passes and he feels ready to try to open his eyes again.

 

His lips are still tingling from the kiss and Lance feels compelled to trace them with his fingers as if to find evidence that it had really happened. But it _did,_ Lance is absolutely positive about that, and his heart starts thudding against his chest, blood rushing in his head just thinking about it.

 

As he’s adjusting to the light, he hears Pidge roll over and groan. Hunk’s snoring ceases and is replaced by a smacking of lips and a cracking of joints.         

 

Keith isn’t there. Lance looks around the room for any sign of the other boy and notices that all of his alien hunting equipment is gone too. Scrambling to find his phone, which had been haphazardly tossed onto his bed the night before, he turns on the screen to check the time, wincing at the extra brightness.

 

It’s almost noon.

 

Well, okay, that puts Keith’s absence into perspective. Maybe he has things to do, aliens to hunt.  It still feels like there’s a hundred-pound weight pulling Lance’s stomach to his feet, though, and it’s really not helping the hangover.

 

“Lance,” Pidge groans, curling into Hunk’s side again to avoid the light. “Why are you up?”

 

Lance snorts. “Pidge, it’s almost noon.”

 

“I don’t see your point,” comes Pidge’s muffled voice. Hunk, however, props himself up by his elbows and rubs his eyes.

 

“Noon, already?” he asks, sitting up with a bearlike yawn. Pidge whines at the loss of both Lance and Hunk and coils further into a ball.

 

Lance chuckles and reaches over to ruffle Pidge’s hair affectionately, though it’s a bit of an absentminded gesture. Hunk seems to catch it despite his own hangover and looks at Lance with concern.

 

“What’s up, Lance? Everything okay?”

 

“Huh?” Lance replies intelligibly before returning to his normal Lance-ish demeanor—or as normal as it can be with how shitty he’s feeling on the inside. “Nothing, big guy. Keith’s gone, though.”

 

“Ah, I see,” Hunk says, managing to read between the lines like he always does somehow. He doesn’t push anything, though. Instead, he just says, “Keith’s a really cool guy. You should bring him over again.”

 

He shoots Lance the warmest smile he can muster, which is pretty damn warm taking into account his hangover. Lance feels as if his insides are suddenly coated in sunshine, and it’s in moments like these when he’s reminded why Hunk is his best friend.

 

“Yeah,” he replies, mind wandering back to the kiss. Does Keith remember it too? “Maybe.”  

 

“You guys, it’s only noon, stop talking,” Pidge mumbles from the floor, face still scrunched up like that’ll help block all of their senses. “I need a blanket.”

 

They reach out with their hand and grab a fistful of Lance’s shirt, pulling him back down to the floor next to them. Lance lets out a yelp and tries really hard not to throw up. As Hunk laughs heartily on the other side of them, Pidge whispers,

 

“Congrats on the kiss, by the way. I think he’s good for you.”

 

Lance is very aware of the flush of red creeping up his neck, up into his cheeks, and he hides it by burying his nose in Pidge’s shoulder. It’s moments like these when he’s reminded why Pidge is his best friend too.

 

* * *

 

That evening, Lance’s heart is threatening to beat out of his chest as he makes his way to the plateau. “ _Does Keith remember?”_ plays over and over in his head like a broken record and there’s a nervous sort of giddiness lining every inch of his bones, cushioning his every step. Is he going to be the one to bring up the kiss? Will Keith? Should they even mention it at all? They were drunk after all, what if it had been a fluke? An impulse decision that meant absolutely nothing? Knowing Keith, the idea that he’d act on impulse is not unlikely. Knowing Lance, the idea that he’d brush the whole thing off as a result of Keith’s impulse is not unlikely.

 

As they settle into their nightly routine, the November wind rushes across the landscape, prompting Lance to pull out the large, fuzzy blanket he’d brought as a precaution and his extra hot coffee. Pulling it around him and settling into the newfound warmth, he notices Keith crouching over, arms crossed, trying very hard not to shiver.

 

Lance opens a part of his blanket and silently offers it to the other, who eyes it for about two seconds before acquiescing and shifting himself over, knee touching Lance’s as he allows Lance to drape the blanket over his shoulders.

 

“Why did you leave this morning?” Lance asks as casually as he can, taking a slow sip of his coffee so he doesn’t have to look at Keith out of fear of giving away how much he’s okay with (enjoying) their close proximity.

 

“I, uh, went to go put all my stuff back at my place,” Keith answers sheepishly, “because I had to come back to town and get groceries.”

 

“Oh, okay,” Lance says, going in for another sip and then simply just leaving his mouth there.

 

Neither of them bring up the kiss that entire night (all the while hoping the other will).

 

They don’t broach the subject Sunday night, either.

 

* * *

 

The kiss as well as the inner turmoil over whether or not to mention it is still swirling around in Lance’s mind come Monday afternoon. He’s currently slouching in a not-so-comfortable chair in front of the desk in Professor Coran’s office with his butt very close to hanging off the seat’s end, staring up at the ceiling.

 

Professor Coran has been meeting with his students individually for the past two weeks to evaluate the status on their third year research project, so Lance _should_ be reviewing his progress and figuring out how he’s going to present it all. Except his mind is far from the project right now. All he can focus on are the backflips his stomach is doing as he think, _I’m going to tell him today._

 

A noise behind him alerts Lance to his surroundings and he quickly picks himself up and sets himself straight in the chair as Professor Coran enters the office, followed by his Teaching Assistant, Allura.

 

Professor Coran is a lanky, middle aged guy with a penchant for oddly shaped moustaches and the most bizarre idioms known to mankind. His natural face is a pleasant one, which makes him rather approachable, but Lance can never guess whether he’ll receive a compliment or a criticism from him. In fact, he’s the exact kind of guy you’d expect to find working in an astrophysics department.

 

This is probably why Lance prefers to meet with Allura when he has a question or a problem with the course material. That, and the fact that she’s probably the most gorgeous human being he’s ever laid eyes on. With rich, dark skin, a heart shaped face, kind, shimmering eyes that could turn fierce in no time at all, and a waterfall of silver hair, Lance had originally felt compelled to throw every single pick up line he could muster at her. It had eventually become clear that Allura was not interested, but Lance found that he wasn’t bothered one bit. She’d become someone Lance trusted and saw as a role model much like Shiro had.  

 

 She smiles at him as she moves to stand behind Professor Coran’s chair, which the professor promptly seats himself in before clapping his hands enthusiastically.

 

“Lance, my boy! How goes it? If I recall, you did very well on your last midterm, so good for you! Now let’s see if I remember your proposal...the 3D imaging model, yes?” he exclaims all in one breath.

 

“Uh, yeah,” Lance says, nodding and bends to unzip his backpack and pull out his notes and photographs. He fumbles with them for a few seconds while trying to get them in order and curses himself for being distracted instead of preparing for this. He starts speaking as he hands his papers over.

 

“Here are a few of the photographs I’ve taken over the last few months—I’ve narrowed the size of each sector so I can chart and do the calculations more accurately—and here are some of my notes and calculations. I’ve been accounting for other properties like metal density, redshift and such so I can compose an interactive index within the model so you can search by specific properties and not just by a specific planetary object.”

 

Lance pauses for a bit, hands jittery and unable to stop fidgeting. Professor Coran shifts through the papers and photographs intently with Allura at them over his shoulder. Finally, Lance reaches into his backpack again and pulls out his laptop.

 

“I can show you the preliminary program too, if you’d like. I’ve only uploaded the data I’ve collected around the inner part of the solar system, but—“

 

“That won’t be necessary Lance,” Professor Coran interrupts with a single cough. “I trust that you know what you’re doing and I’ll take a look at the finished program, though if you have questions, you can certainly take them too Allura—sorry, it’s just that I’ve got a faculty meeting to run to very soon. Now, as for what I see here...”

 

He trails off and shuffles through the papers again.

 

“It seems you’ve been very thorough in your data collection, and, so far, your calculations are looking impressive. I’d say you’re on the right track. There is just one issue, however.”

 

Lance perks up, careful not to suddenly drop the laptop that’s balancing on his knees.

 

“Yeah, what’s up?”

 

“Well, I’m not sure how to say this exactly,” Professor Coran starts before finally setting all of the papers down and lacing his palms together on his desk, looking straight at Lance. Though he may be hard to read sometimes, it doesn’t take a genius to know that what he’s about to say isn’t simply a small issue. Lance begins to fidget even more.

 

“Lance,” he starts again, “you’re a very smart and talented young man. I see a lot of potential in you. The problem is, you don’t seem to know how to put it to use. You’re getting good grades in my class, but when it comes to application, you seem to falling a little flat. All of this,” he gestures to Lance’s notes, “is well executed and all, and sure, a 3D star model is interesting, but the project lacks vision, _ambition._ It’s not really furthering or contributing to the science of astronomy and physics. Plus, it seems, with your current methods, you’ll be restricting yourself to _just_ our solar system.”

 

Lance’s palms are sweaty now, barely holding onto his laptop. A blanket of familiar dread has settled over him and his tongue seems stuck to the roof of his mouth. He nods but can’t bring himself to say anything.

 

“Son, there’s definitely more that you can do here. Just think about it,” his professor concludes before glancing at his watch and practically yelping. “And I’ve only got two minutes to make it to the staff meeting, I can’t be late again. Lance, pleasure meeting with you as always. You can direct any questions you have to Allura. Good day!”

 

And then he’s out of the office, breezing through the door like a gust of wind and leaving Lance rigid in his seat. His heartbeat is pounding in his ears, the space between his eyes suddenly heavy and aching. It’s too familiar, _much_ too familiar. The words “lacking vision” and “falling flat” are ringing in his brain and in this moment, like many other moments before, he can’t tell if he’s 20-year-old Lance or 14-year-old Lance.

 

“Lance?” Allura’s voice cuts through the fog and there’s a firm, reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

 

“Not really,” Lance manages to mutter, looking up into Allura’s concerned face. He swallows, suddenly feeling guilty that she has to be worried. Because of _him._ It’s his problem, after all, and he’s long since learned not to bother people with his self doubts.

 

Taking as deep of a breath as he can, he sits up straight and shoots Allura a wobbly smile. “Don’t worry, girl,” he says, trying to project some humor into his words. “I’ll figure it out.”

 

Allura scrutinizes him with sharp eyes for a few more seconds before finally nodding and squeezing his shoulder. “Alright. But if you need any help, don’t hesitate to ask me. And maybe talk to Shiro as well. He might be able to help you brainstorm.”

 

Lance nods again, mouth dry as he maintains the smile on his face until Allura, too, is out of the office.

 

As soon as he’s alone, Lance bends over, his elbows digging into his thighs, and catches his face in his hands. He tries really, really hard not to hyperventilate.

 

* * *

 

He’s not sure what draws him to the plateau that evening considering he’d decided in an anxiety driven rage to completely scrap his project. He’d spent the last few hours face down on his bed with his backpack still on his shouldrs, and pretended to be asleep when Hunk suggested grabbing dinner. Finally, probably because it’s routine, he’d eventually flung himself out of bed, and started heading to the plateau. He just really needs to think, or maybe not think at all.

 

As he drags his feet across the rough ground and to the edge of plateau, Lance can vaguely make out Keith’s silhouette in the darkness. Suddenly a rush of everything he’d been thinking about _before_ his meeting with Professor Coran floods him and if he doesn’t sit down soon he’ll probably overheat.

 

Keith looks up expectantly when he hears the scuffling of Lance’s feet behind him, eyes trailing Lance as he quietly drops himself into the space Keith’s cleared out for him, legs hanging over the edge. Lance doesn’t move to return Keith’s gaze yet, simply shrugging out of his backpack and staring out at the desert.

 

“Hey dumbass, you’re late,” Keith greets jokingly, bumping Lance’s knee with his fist.

 

Lance forces himself to wear the same wobbly smile he’d shown Allura and turns to greet Keith.

           

“Hey,” he replies, though the word comes out hoarse and meek and he internally cringes at the sound of it.

 

Keith withdraws his hand and leans back a little, eyebrows knitting together as his dark eyes dart across Lance’s face.

 

“Lance...? What—where’s your telescope?”

 

“Why did you leave on Saturday morning?” Lance asks, dropping his gaze to his lap where his fingers are fiddling with each other restlessly.

 

“I already told you,” he hears Keith say, “I had to put my stuff away and get groceries.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” Lance mumbles, shoulders sinking further under the rising level of stupidity he’s feeling.

 

There’s a gloved hand squeezing his shoulder.

 

“Lance,” Keith says, any confusion in his voice now gone. “What’s wrong.”

 

Maybe it’s because he phrases it as a statement that Lance can’t answer it with “Nothing.” Maybe it’s because Keith is looking at him the way Allura did, the way Hunk did, and he’s tired of making the people he cares about worry for him because really, it’s his own fault for being so _stupid,_ isn’t it? Maybe it’s because between trying to breathe properly and spiraling into the familiar territory of the “ _you’re too out there, Lance_ ”s and the “ _you lack vision, Lance_ ”s that remind him of all of his failures, his shoulders break under the weight of his anxiety. Either way, he feels words and frustration and sorrow climb up his throat.

 

“I threw my project away,” Lance says through gritted teeth.

 

Keith blinks, but doesn’t take his hand off Lance’s shoulder. “What?”

 

“ _I threw away my project, Keith,_ ” Lance enunciates much louder now, his voice echoing across the empty expanse in front of them.

 

Keith doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t move his hand either. Lance’s body is shaking now and the words are starting to gush out like a waterfall.

 

“I met with my professor today about my research and he basically went “oh, this is good, Lance, except not really because it’s boring and but you have potential, Lance, you’re just not contributing to science.” Which, you know, fine, whatever, but you could have told me this _when I submitted my proposal to you._ Allura could have mentioned _something_ one of the bajillion times I went to go ask for her help. But, no, I do—I do—“

 

He jerks out of Keith’s grip, startling the other, and reaches for his backpack. He rips the zipper open and furiously begins to empty the bag’s contents, scattering his notes and carefully taken photographs all over the both of their laps and the terrain. Keith immediately begins to gather some of the papers up, trying to stack them in his lap so they don’t all fly away, and curiously begins to sift through them.

 

“I do all of _this,_ ” Lance croaks, gesturing at everything he’s pulled out. “I come out here for _months_ and spent hours on calculations and it _still_ isn’t enough—“

 

“What were you doing? What was the project on?” Keith asks in the middle of his tirade. Then, realizing he’s interrupted, Keith clears his throat and looks up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—“

 

Lance shrugs dejectedly. “I was trying to create a 3D star imaging model with a unique index and classification system. Coran was all “you can still come up with ideas” and then Allura goes “oh, maybe Shiro can help you brainstorm,” like yeah fucking right.”

 

Keith continues to go through the papers in his lap, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing.

 

“Well, I suppose it is a bit mundane but...” he starts, looking up to meet Lance’s eyes, “Maybe going to Shiro isn’t a bad idea? He could help.”

 

“ _Shiro is the one who gave me the idea,_ ” Lance cries out hoarsely, burying his face in his hands, then aggressively running his fingers through his hair. At this point, he’s fighting every bone in his body to hold back tears as the sensation of shame overwhelms him after witnessing Keith’s shocked face.

 

“I—When we were assigned the research project, I couldn’t think of anything that fit the criteria. I just completely blanked and every idea I had I knew would get rejected because, let’s be real, I haven’t come up with anything valid in a _really_ long time. I eventually asked Shiro for help and he dug up some old idea he’d had back when he was a senior in high school.”

 

He’s going to choke if he keeps going, his lungs barely keeping up with him. His throat is parched and his voice sounds like he’s gurgling gravel, but he doesn’t stop.

 

“The project was never _mine,_ Keith. I just took his idea and ran with it. I—“

 

His throat clogs and Lance finds himself on the verge of dry heaving. He needs to breathe, but he can’t and—

 

One of Keith’s hands finds his shoulder again and the other takes Lance’s hand, grasping him lightly by the wrist, and places it on his chest.

 

“Breathe,” he says firmly, holding his eyes steady with Lance’s. “In and out, Lance. Breathe.”

 

Lance’s eyes flicker down to where his hand is on Keith’s chest and then back up, becoming aware of the regularity of the other’s breathing, just like when he’d laid next to him before their kiss. Lance lets out a few shaky breaths, attempting to mimic Keith’s rhythm, until his head isn’t so lightheaded anymore and oxygen is finding its way through his body with more ease than before.

 

Pulling his hand away from Keith, he drops his gaze again and lets out a breathy and bitter chuckle.

 

“I was gonna be an aerospace engineer, you know,” he says, voice on the edge of a whisper. “I was gonna be the one who made travel to Neptune and Pluto and maybe even another system possible. Maybe I was even gonna _be_ the one who got to go there. Sometimes I still think about it—picturing myself designing a probe that can sustain itself in Neptune’s Great Dark Spot.”

 

“Then why didn’t you?” Keith breathes.

 

Lance shakes his head, voice cracking,

 

“Because I _can’t._ I _know_ I can’t. I used to design and invent and show people all the time. I’d do science fairs and each year I’d bring in a project _way_ better than the year before. But everyone kept telling me that my ideas wouldn’t work. That I’m just too _out there._ That pursuing any of my ideas would be a waste of time. I kept trying, though. I tried _so much._ But by the time I got to my senior year, I was tired. I was tired of inventing and tired of failing. Ultimately I realized that I just wasn’t good enough to do what I wanted to do, I wasn’t born to be great. I’m just Lance.”

 

“I settled, Keith,” he utters weakly. “I settled for astrophysics because I figured I could _at least_ do research, and, I mean, I would still be studying what I liked. But I guess I suck at even that too, huh?”

 

His body feels like a deflated balloon, the frustration and anxiety released and replaced by fatigue and self pity. This is the first time he’s said all of this out loud and actually articulating emotions he’s grown so used to feels foreign on his tongue. He thinks that maybe he shouldn’t have said a word.

 

"Lance.”

 

He doesn’t look up.

 

“ _Lance._ ”

 

Saying it all was a mistake, he should have just dealt with it like he always does.

 

“Lance, look at me.”

 

Lance feels two calloused hands cup both sides of his face and bring his head up until his eyes and Keith’s are on the same level. Keith has tossed aside his gloves, his rough palms caressing Lance’s cheeks firmly yet gently, and his eyes are sharp and determined.

 

“Do you want to know why I started looking for aliens?” he asks sharply, but doesn’t give Lance time to answer. “Because they took my parents. I _saw_ them do so, Lance, they took them right in front of my eyes. But no one believed me when I told them that. They just saw me as this traumatized kid and tossed me away. My grandparents, my teachers, my therapist, they all danced around me and told me euphemisms about my parents being dead and treating me like I was made out of glass instead of believing me.”

 

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, but doesn’t remove his hands.

 

“It would have been so easy to give up, Lance. I was so close to it too, just becoming a ghost of a person, surviving instead of living. And then my grandfather took me to the park. Remember how I told you I needed the unknown and the adrenaline? It’s true. I needed to know that there was more out there, and not just so that I could experience it. I needed to know that the world was full of enough possibility that what I _believed_ could be true. That even if I’m wrong, even if everyone says I’m wrong, I _could_ be right. And I found beauty in that Lance. It took me years of therapy and medication to finally feel like living again instead of surviving, but knowing that I was valid even when the world didn’t want me to be, that went a long way.”

 

When he opens his eyes again, they’ve softened, coated with a calmness Lance doesn’t think he’s really ever known in his life. His breath catches in his throat.

 

“That’s why I’m here, Lance, in the desert instead of in school,” Keith continues, voice much softer now as well. Lance never knew it could get so soft. “Because I knew if I let go of looking for what I didn’t know and did what everyone expected me to do, I’d die inside again. And I don’t want that to happen.”

 

The smile Keith gives Lance as he shifts his hands from his face to settle them on Lance’s wrists is so tender it almost melts Lance on the spot. It’s a wonder that he doesn’t, and that his wrists and forearms don’t turn into mush. He still can’t bring himself to say anything, though. He doesn’t know _what_ to say. Speaking seems inappropriate right now.

 

“I know it’s not nearly the same thing for you,” Keith continues after a few moments. “and I know I’ve only known you for a few months, but you’ve shown me so many things I could never have even thought to look for. The way you love people, the sky, the world—hell, you see _stories_ in the stars—it’s contagious and it makes everyone want to fall in love with something. You’re a dreamer, Lance, and that’s inspired me in ways I’ve never been before. And I’d be willing to bet my desert shack that Hunk and Pidge feel the same way.”

 

Lance can’t help but snort at that, which prompts a grin from Keith and a light squeeze around his wrists.

 

“Listen, I can’t tell you that you’re capable, because I have no idea what you can do. But that’s the point, Lance. _Nobody_ knows what you can do, so there’s no way they can tell you what you can’t. Only _you_ know what you’re capable of. And you dream really big. You just have to believe in those dreams, and believe in yourself. Okay?”

 

If Lance hadn’t been holding on dearly to every one of those words, he would have remarked how much that sounded like the moral of a Disney movie. Instead, he’s sitting here, breath still shaky. There’s an emotion he can’t name that’s blooming in his gut, a mix between pride and anticipation maybe, and he’s still trying to wrap his head around everything Keith just said.

 

So he murmurs, “Okay,” and says nothing else. He doesn’t speak even after Keith withdraws his hands (though he misses them), or even after Keith gives him one more encouraging smile before gently placing all of his notes and photographs back into his lap, or even after they finally both turn away from each other, Keith back to tinkering with his alien equipment and Lance staring out into the landscape.

 

He knows that even though he’d told Keith he’d believe in himself, it’ll take a long while before he’s alleviated from all of the self doubt he’s accumulated over the years. Fuck, it might even take years just to undo it all, but tonight he feels as if he’s made a promise, not to just Keith but to himself as well. And he’s never been one to break his word.

 

So Lance straightens his spine, takes a deep breath, and urges himself to think, _Okay, I can fix this, maybe I can find an answer here. No, I_ can _find an answer here,_ as he slowly starts to go over his notes again one by one.

  

* * *

 

 

They’ve sat in silence for two hours, neither of them really feeling like they need to speak. But drowsiness is creeping up on Lance like vines of ivy and and his stomach is protesting at how empty it is. He didn’t even have his regular vanilla coffee with him to help him stay awake. He’d give anything for Hunk to come and carry him back to his dorm because he doesn’t feel capable of walking back and the feeling of Hunk’s large arms around him sounds really comfy right now. Except it’s late and Hunk is definitely sound asleep by now.

 

It’s in this delirium, however, that he notices it.

 

“Holy shit,” he mumbles to himself, suddenly sitting up alert and flipping back and forth between his notes.

 

“Holy shit,” he repeats, louder this time. “ _Holy shit._ ”

 

He hears Keith next to him start to say his name in confusion, but Lance cuts him off with a louder and more emphatic, _“Holy shit. Keith.”_

 

He plucks a few pages of his notes out of the stack in his lap and thrusts them under the other’s nose.

 

“Look at this!” he exclaims and waits for Keith to take the pages out of his hands. Lance is practically bouncing with excitement and energy he didn’t know he had at the moment. It’s simply too good to be true, but there it is, the answer under his nose the _whole_ time.

 

Keith’s brow is furrowed as he sifts through the pages and attempts to decipher Lance’s handwriting and calculations.

 

“What am I looking at here?” he asks.

 

Lance reaches over and points ecstatically at various spots on various pages, the answer becoming even clearer to him as he does so.

 

“Don’t you see it?” he replies. “There’s a _pattern_ here, Keith. Like holy shit, how did I not notice it before? Wait—“

 

He grabs the notes back, taking Keith by surprise, and flicks through them again, forehead scrunching in concentration. His brain is running at like 100 miles per hour and he’s barely aware that he’s left Keith staring at him for minutes instead of just seconds.

 

“Lance, what—“ Keith tries once more, but is interrupted again.

 

“Keith, how exactly do your radars work. Like, what are they picking up on?”

 

“Um,” Keith replies intelligibly, still not seeing the relevance or whatever Lance is seeing. It’s okay, though. It makes sense in Lance’s head, and that’s what counts, right? “Well, I figure extraterrestrial life isn’t limited to just carbon based species like us because it’s just too unlikely. So I’ve set everything up to trace things like excess amounts of silicon and sulfur in living beings and frequencies that we don’t normally find on Earth too.”

           

Lance nods furiously to himself, biting his bottom lip. “Okay, okay. Could you maybe write those frequencies down really quick?”

 

Keith frowns, slightly frustrated at the sudden whirlwind Lance has become, but he knows better than to protest. Lance rummages through his backpack to produce a pen that he eagerly shoves into Keith’s fingers. Keith turns back and forth between tinkering with a few pieces of his equipment and scribbling on one page of Lance’s notes.

 

When he’s finished, Lance compiles all of his pages again and crams them into his backpack. He jumps to his feet, ignoring the dizziness brought about by his empty stomach, and shoulders his backpack with renewed determination.

 

“Okay, so I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I think I’ve got an idea that I can work on for the research project. It’ll take a bit to figure it out, but I’ll come back when I do.”

 

Lance looks down at Keith who’s considering him with an expression of pride and confusion, and smiles with all the warmth of a promise fulfilled. He nudges the other boy’s thigh with his shoe.

 

“Thanks, Keith. For being there every night.”

 

His heart skips a beat when he notices, even in the darkness, a blush color Keith’s cheeks as he fights his muscles to keep from grinning.

 

“It’s not like I have a choice, huh?” he replies.

 

 _He remembers,_ Lance thinks.

 

( _Come back,_ Keith thinks.)

  

* * *

 

 

Lance isn’t really a library person like Hunk and Pidge are and mostly studies in relatively busy places like coffee shops and public parks. Yet he now spends every moment of his free time at the university’s library. He’s taken to crashing his friends’ normal study table, which they would have normally protested since Lance has trouble keeping still in quiet places, but he finds that he’s having a hard time concentrating on anything _but_ his research project.

 

_“Are you seriously ignoring Hunk’s dinner text?” Pidge asks, looking over their laptop screen with an eyebrow raised._

_“I’m not hungry right now, I’ll grab dinner later,” Lance answers without taking his eyes off his work and scribbling furiously. “Plus, you’re ignoring it too.”_

_“Well, yeah,” Pidge admits grudgingly, “but that’s like_ my _thing. You’re the one who’s supposed to race to beat us all to the dining hall.”_

_“Like I said, I’m not really hungry at the moment,” Lance says, shrugging. “Plus, this equation is kicking my ass.”_

 

* * *

 

" _You’ve skipped three classes in a row, Lance,” Allura says as Lance noisily sips his milkshake across the table from her. “One more absence and it’ll start affecting your grade. Professor Coran is a bit worried."_

_“It’s all good,” Lance answers casually, beaming at her. “I’ve getting the notes from my lab partner so I’ve been keeping up and everything.”_

_“Yeah but, is everything alright?” Shiro asks, a concerned look on his face. He’s also sitting across from Lance and to the right of Allura in the booth of the diner they all like to frequent. “I mean, it’s not like you to skip, let alone three times in a row.”_

_Hunk and Pidge join them, milkshakes in one hand, napkins in the other, as they slide in the booth next to Lance._

_“Wait, did you skip class again today to work on your project?” Hunk asks._

_Lance nods and looks at the four of them excitedly. “Yep. And I think I’m really onto something, you guys.”_

* * *

 

 

_"I can’t believe Lance fell asleep during Trivia Night,” Hunk whispers, genuinely surprised._

_They’re in Pidge’s room for once because they needed a change of scenery and Pidge’s roommate apparently has a girlfriend now so she’d gone to stay the night with her._

_“Yeah,” Pidge responds equally quietly as they look down at Lance’s sleeping figure curled up peacefully on their bed. “He’s been working really hard on that project, though. He’s been in the library like 24x7. Has he even been back to the plateau?”_

_Hunk shakes his head. “Nah, not that I know of. Do you think something happened between him and Keith?”_

_Pidge shrugs. “I’m not sure. He hasn’t said anything about it. We should take him to his bed, yeah?”_

_Hunk hums in agreement and scoops Lance up as gently as he can so as not to disturb his slumber and heads out of the room, Pidge following behind._

* * *

 

_“The sooner I finish this,” Lance thinks, irritated, at 4 am and just a few hours before one his finals, “the sooner I’ll be free from this quantum physics hell. And the sooner I can go tell Keith I’ve got it.”_

* * *

When Lance finally heads back to the plateau, finals week has just ended and everyone on campus is preparing to head home for the holidays. He’s running faster than he ever has before, heart thudding against his ribs, whether from the exercise or the prospect of seeing Keith again, he’s not sure.

 

He’s also not sure if Keith will even be there. It’s been almost a month since he’d left the other boy at the plateau to run off and work on his new project idea. He hadn’t even asked for Keith’s number—does he even have service in the desert?—which is honestly the _stupidest_ thing he’s ever done in his life.

 

But he’s accomplished something, many things, in the past few weeks and he’s here now, running to meet the person he’s been missing so much, he physically aches.

 

_God in heaven, if you love me, let Keith be there, please._

 

It turns out that God does, indeed, love Lance because when he finally gets within seeing distance of the edge of the plateau, he sees the all too familiar silhouette sitting there. He’d be laughing out of happiness right now if he weren’t panting so hard.

 

Struggling to control his breathing, Lance slows to a walking pace, unable to keep the grin off his face any longer.

 

“You’re in my spot,” he calls out, his stomach flip flopping when Keith turns around.

 

As he steps closer, he sees that there is an empty space on the ground next to Keith and his heart soars past all layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. Keith has been clearing a spot for him all this time.

The expression on Keith’s face undergoes a drastic transformation from shock to happiness to rage. It’s almost like watching those computer programs manipulate the image of a person’s face with age or mixing it with someone else’s, Lance notes.

 

“This isn’t your spot,” Keith grumbles, turning away just as quickly as he’d turned around. “You haven’t been here for like a month, so it’s mine now.”

 

“Oh yeah?” Lance challenges and flops down on the empty space, pointing to it. “So what’s this, hm?”

 

“Dirt,” Keith replies stubbornly, arms folded.

 

“Oh man, yeah, you’re right,” Lance says, feigning dejection. “For some reason I thought you missed me or something. Weird, huh?”

 

Keith could have responded in a multitude of ways, but Lance definitely doesn’t expect him to suddenly turn Lance into a punching bag.

 

“Ow! Ow! Watch it!” Lance exclaims trying to shield his upper right arm from the barrage of punches Keith is delivering him.

 

“You. Left. Me. Hanging. For. A. Whole. Month. You. _Idiot,_ ” Keith enunciates through his teeth between every punch.

 

Eventually Lance catches his wrists, and though Keith doesn’t put up much of a fight, the anger coating his face is still very clear. He gulps, hoping he really isn’t too late.

 

“Okay,” he says slowly, “but it was for a really good reason. Keith, that thing that I found, it _worked._ ”

 

Keith looks incredibly unconvinced, his demeanor demanding a valid explanation. Lance takes a deep breath, rapidly thinking about how to summarize all that he has to say.

 

“So, the world works in patterns, we know this. Things are always somehow measurable in increments of two, or five, or ten. Flower petals follow the Fibonacci sequence. The Golden Ratio, Pascal’s pyramid, and all that, right? But patterns aren’t just limited to the scope of Earth. In theory, if nature on Earth follows a pattern, then maybe the universe does too. After all, it’s governed by laws of physics similar to the ones on Earth.”

 

Lance pauses to take another breath and quickly scans Keith’s face for a change. He doesn’t seem to be _angry_ anymore, but his body reads a mixture of questioning and impatience.

 

“ _So,_ when I was going through my notes and calculations, I noticed a pattern in some of the properties certain space objects exhibited. There seemed to be some kind of repetition within each of the sectors I was taking pictures of. So I hit the library every day and dug up a whole bunch of research so I could work on my theory. It turns out the randomness of the universe is just _one whole giant pattern._ I was freaking losing my shit man, I kid you not. I still haven’t found out what the pattern really _is_ exactly because it’s not one we’ve documented on Earth, but I’m definitely at a good starting point.”

 

He’s rambling now and he only barely notices it when Keith shrugs his wrists out of Lance’s hands and places them at his ankles. He seems to be listening intently now, eyes focused directly on Lance’s face and, suddenly, Lance starts to feel a growing sense of impatience as well.

 

“When I finally pitched the theory to Professor Coran and showed him the evidence, he was _blown_ off his feet. He was all _“do you realize if you’re able to come up with the correct algorithm, you could chart unknown space?”_ and I was like yeah, of course, that’s why I’m here. Anyway, I started trying to write the algorithm and he suggested that I present it to the board of this research scholarship the university offers so I could work on it past the project deadline and have more resources. So I did.”

 

Lance sucks in a breath, not even attempting to contain his giddiness.

 

“And they _loved_ it, Keith. They gave me the grant two days later. I’m gonna be able to keep researching over the summer and stuff. It could _really_ be a breakthrough.”

 

By the time he’s finished speaking, Keith’s face has softened drastically and he’s gazing at Lance with a tender pride that makes him want to melt into the ground and live happily as a puddle.

 

“Lance, that’s amazing. Congratulations,” Keith says, smiling. “I might forgive you,” he adds, shrugging, “for leaving me alone for a month.”  

 

Now, Lance would have _totally_ protested the whole “might” issue if he didn't have more news to deliver. This is where the impatience is coming in because he hasn’t even relayed to Keith the best part.

 

“Keith, that’s not even the best part,” he says, surprised at how gentle his tone is considering his excitement. “You know the properties you told me your alien equipment scans for? I found a way to plug them into the algorithm. Keith, that means not only could you chart unknown space, you could find—“

 

“Extraterrestrial beings,” Keith breaths, eyes wide in shock and wonder. “Holy shit.”

 

Lance nods fervently. “Or at least planets that can host them. And find them at a much faster rate than we’re currently finding them. I know it’s not a lot but, hey. Aliens.”

 

Keith snorts. He looks so open, happy, and carefree right now, the only thing Lance wants to be doing is touching him. So that’s what he does. Reaching out, he lays his fingers over Keith’s, hooking onto them loosely as he peers at the other’s soft and handsome face.

 

“When I told the board about that part of the algorithm, I mentioned that it wouldn’t have been possible without you. I told them that you’d be a really important for the progress of the project and you should be allowed to work on developing that part of the algorithm with me.”

 

“What,” Keith deadpans. His eyes are darting rapidly across Lance’s face, searching for the meaning behind Lance’s words. His fingers curl around Lance’s ever so slightly, as if in a cautious hope.

 

“They said you had to be a full time student. So I asked if they could get the school to admit you back into the program,” Lance breaths, his voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t have to stay in your desert shack alone anymore. Come back, Keith. Come back and look for aliens with me.”

 

Lance has absolutely no idea who moves first, but he supposes that doesn’t really matter right now because his lips are on Keith’s and his fingers are cupping the back of Keith’s neck, thumbs brushing right beneath his chin. Keith’s hands are gripping his face, fingers threading their way into his short brown hair and Lance feels himself leaning until his back hits the ground.

 

Keith is kissing him like there’s no tomorrow, lips moving and consuming like he’s been starved—and really, Lance isn’t surprised because he’s felt the same hunger too. Tilting his head for a better angle, Lance lets his tongue skim the surface of Keith’s bottom lip. Keith takes the hint and now they’re closer than Lance ever dreamed they’d be, lips hungry and enthusiastic, tongues dancing, teeth clashing. His arms find Keith’s waist and wrap around it, holding on for dear life as Lance allows the sensation of _Keith_ —the rude, impulsive, hardheaded stranger he’d met three months ago—overwhelm every part of him.

 

“Yes,” Keith breathes against Lance’s lips, pulling back slightly to catch his breath before peppering Lance’s face with fluttering kisses. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, _yes._ ”

 

Lance figures that’s a yes to Keith coming back with him.

 

* * *

 

“Stop hogging all the coffee,” Lance whines, impatiently holding his hand out while Keith practically takes gulps out of _his_ thermos. “Hunk brewed it especially for me.”

 

“No, he specifically said he made it for _us,_ ” Keith retorts before lifting the thermos to his lips again. “And calm down, I’m not going to finish it. It’s a huge thermos.”

 

“Okay, but it’s _my_ thermos,” Lance protests, draping himself across Keith’s lap, hoping that maybe he can annoy the other into giving up the coffee.

 

Keith screws the lid back on the container and sets it aside, just a bit away from Lance’s reach.

 

“Yeah, but you’re mine, so the thermos is mine by default.”

 

Lance shifts so that he’s looking directly up at his boyfriend’s face, trying really hard to glare at him and hoping the blush crawling up his skin isn’t as prominent as it feels.

“ _Jesus_ Keith, you can’t just say things like that,” he mutters, reaching up to try to smear off the smirk that’s growing on Keith’s face.

 

Keith swats his hand away and leans down to peck his lips. “You like it when I say shit like that, though.”

 

“You are so lucky I have a thing for your bluntness,” Lance says, rolling his eyes and pulling the other down for a longer kiss. If he can’t have his coffee, then he’ll at least take this. Tit for tat.

 

It’s a gentle March night and they’re both sitting on a tarp at their customary plateau surrounded by highly advanced equipment that they’d both never expected to be using. Highly advanced equipment that they’re _supposed_ to be making use of right now. But they’ve both just finished an exhausting week of midterms and are content with doing absolutely nothing right now except curl against each other and bask in the other’s company.

 

The gentlest desert breeze blows through and Lance watches pensively as it rustles Keith’s bangs, a warmth he’s gotten very accustomed to pooling into his gut and nervous system.

 

“Hey, Keith?”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“So if you were in that desert shack for two years, why did you suddenly show up here at the plateau.”

 

“There was too much interference at the shack. It’s a lot clearer at a higher vantage point. Plus, the view up here is much better.”

 

“Hmm, I know, right? I am pretty good looking.”

 

Keith groans.

 

* * *

 

Lance Jimenez is a dreamer. He’s met a lot of people in his life that have reminded him of this, some encouraging and some not so much. A lot has happened that’s made him resent the title, but he’s starting to accept now that it’s who he is. It’s hard sometimes because people don’t seem to grasp that dreams are the foundation of every visionary’s success, but that’s okay. Lance’s dream is to prove them all wrong one day.

 

Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he can still see the vision of his family, Hunk, Pidge, Keith, and himself standing happily under a dark blanket of glittering stars. It’s his favorite one to think of because he knows that it will come true some day, just like all of his dreams will.

 

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I deeply apologize for not putting more Shiro and Allura in this. I just couldn't make them fit. 
> 
> 2\. The title is a (slightly edited) line from the song "New Constellation" by Toad the Wet Sprocket.
> 
> Find me on twitter [@satyasvaswani](https://twitter.com/satyasvaswani) and tumblr[ sunmp3](https://sunmp3.tumblr.com).


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